Chris Lucas Trust: great north bike ride

Content design and content creation
Written By Ellie Lovell
A person riding a bike with other riders behind.

In July 2016, Utterly Content was approached by the Chris Lucas Trust to help raise awareness and support for their annual fundraising event – the Great North Bike Ride.

The Chris Lucas Trust was founded in the year 2000 by parents of Chris Lucas who passed away from Rhabdomyosarcoma. The charity funds research into this rare childhood cancer. The Great North Bike Ride is their biggest fundraising event and takes place at the end of August each year.

The organisers were looking for short-term support to raise awareness of the event and recruit more cyclists to take part.

 Given the very tight timescale and limited budget available, we focused on:

  • Making improvements to the GNBR website to help convert people who were potentially interested, into signed-up participants. This included copywriting, design/layout and navigational improvements.

  • Improving the existing social media accounts – Facebook and Twitter - to make them more professional and engaging.

  • Identifying and targeting potential sponsors and participants on Twitter i.e. cycling enthusiasts, cycling companies and groups, and North East businesses.

  • Posting content more frequently to social media, to drive traffic and enquiries to the website.

Here you can see a before and after shot of the website:

Before

After

The Great North Bike Ride website before our improvements, with a bright blue background, various logos dotted around the page and hard-to-read text.
The Great North Bike Ride website after our improvements, with an eye-catching image of people in a bike race on a clear and simple white page.

When Utterly Content initially received the enquiry from the Chris Lucas Trust in July, there were 600 participants registered for the ride. By the time the event took place at the end of August, there 900 participants fundraising for the Chris Lucas Trust!

We saw a lot more positive social media interactions, retweets and mentions with relevant accounts and saw an increased number of profile visits. 

The event was a great success (despite poor weather) and we were very happy to be supporting such a great local charity in the North East of England.

Ellie Lovell
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