Now that the first six months of 2024 have been and gone, we’re looking back over the first half of the year as we plot the way forward to Christmas. We asked John to give us an overview of what’s been happening at Clearbox (well, what is now the Clearbox Group…) in 2024 so far and here it is, for your reading pleasure.
I’ll get my usual reference to either music or football in a blog post in early this time. Punk (my colleagues will start rolling their eyes round about now) is one of my favourite music genres because the founding bands (Pistols, Ramones, Clash, Stooges, etc.) played what should have been two hour sets in about 20 minutes.
That’s how the first half of 2024 has felt at the Clearbox Group.
We’ve achieved a lot, created a lot, and changed a lot in a short space of time, and it’s been a wild, wild ride.
We continued doing our PR, CSR and social media thing for our world-class client base, launched a new company and moved to a new office. As you do in a six-month period. Here’s some of our best bits of 2024 so far.
Our team
It all starts and ends with our team. Joe Strummer said: “without people, you’re nothing” and he’s right. Our team has continued to grow in skills, confidence, and numbers over the last six months. Blaise joined our account exec team a few months ago, followed soon after by Megan who joined us as a senior account exec from a London agency.
Alex, Ella, Hannah, Zoe and Lauren all got promoted and the rest of the team continues to plough through their career pathways at a punk gig-esque pace. I feel very lucky to work with everyone at Clearbox and they’re all well on their way to the top of the PR, CSR and social media consultancy game. Even if some of them exhibit a shocking lack of tea making…
We had a lot of fun team events too, including an amazing trip to Berlin to visit our sister company Laika, a brilliant night at Belfast Cookery School, many a lunch at Trademarket (RIP), after work drinks across our fine city and more…
Our clients
We’ve done A LOT of great campaigns this year so far.
Our Amazon PR team has worked on dozens of campaigns for Comic Relief, Learning at Work Week, National Apprenticeship Week, Amazon Innovation Accelerator, Prime Day, Amazon Career Choice, International Women in Engineering Day and more. We launched several new micromobility hubs with Amazon Logistics, including one in our home city of Belfast, and we’ve continued to create lots of press coverage for Amazon’s fantastic community impact programmes.
Our Amazon Community Impact team helped manage a successful Community Engagement summit in Birmingham and has assisted with donations and volunteering opportunities with hundreds of charities in the UK and Ireland. They helped manage Amazon Global Month of Volunteering and worked on campaigns with Comic Relief, the National Literacy Trust and much, much more.
For Oatly, we launched the brilliant Feck-Oatly.com with a PR, social and comedy event campaign and we worked on VOAT in Ireland with PR, events and social media support around the European Elections.
We managed the PR around the 2024 Deliveroo Restaurant of the Year awards, and helped 3EN and Synergy Learning continue to reach audiences through PR in Northern Ireland, Ireland and the UK. We continued working with Neptune Software to create stories for trade media in the UK and Ireland about low code/no code and all the benefits that come with it.
We took over the Incorporate Benefits LinkedIn channel to grow followers through social media and we managed several successful campaigns for the Taste & Tour team, including launching the new Edinburgh food tour with a PR campaign in Scottish media.
For Morelli’s, we got our summer social media campaigns up and running once again while also helping the brand celebrate awards and new product launches in the media. Staying with award-winning food, we started working with the team at DELI LITES IRELAND on PR and CSR campaigns (watch this space for more!) and we hosted a messaging workshop for one of our newest clients, Epitome Living.
Our company. Or should that say ‘group’…
We became the Clearbox Group and launched a brand-new consultancy called Neighbourgood. Neighbourgood is a CSR consultancy that works with companies and brands to create and manage impactful and measurable community support and employee volunteering programmes.
The brilliantly talented Neighbourgood team, led by divisional director Alex, has hit the ground running and is already working with new clients on some exciting and impactful CSR campaigns that will go live in the not-too-distant future.
We’re not done there.
We’ll be launching another new consultancy later this year. Or should that be consultancies. Let’s see…
We also hosted our first ever event, when our communications manager Amy presented to 15 local SMEs about messaging, branding and the importance of getting it right.
Our training programmes
We won awards at the Belfast Telegraph Business Awards and the Irish News Workplace and Employment awards for our training programmes and for what Clearbox is like as a place to work. Still not over that – we’re so, so happy about those!
Our community
We donated more than £2,000 of office products and furniture and more than £1,000 in cash to charitable organisations that positively impact our communities. Organisations we supported include Habitat for Humanity and the Portadown Festival Association.
Our office
Not satisfied with doing dozens of amazing campaigns, seeing loads of our team get promoted, winning awards and launching a new company, we also moved office. We don’t really do half measures here and when you see our new place, you’ll see what I mean by that.
I need a lie down.
FORWARD!
