British Gymnastics

Reaching new heights; Driving mass coverage ahead of the World Trampolining Championships

PHA’s specialist Sport team were challenged to raise the profile of British Trampolining’s best athletes – whilst driving awareness of the British Trampolining Championships and World Trampolining Championships.

Despite the incredible talent and success which surrounds British Trampolining, before being engaged by British Gymnastics, professional trampolining had received little media attention, particularly across regional media. Determined to rewrite this wrong, our strategy was multi-fold.

First and foremost, our strategy centred on profiling some of Britain’s most heralded trampolinists and uncovering those with strong human interest stories such as trampolining veteran and two times Olympic medallist, Bryony Page.

We also wanted to ensure we were introducing audiences to rising stars such as the incredible Naana Oppon, a 16-year-old schoolgirl who went on to be named British Women’s Tumbling Champion. We spent time uncovering the news line in their stories and were able to secure widespread coverage across media titles including Mail Online, Reuters and Metro, titles that had previously given very little column inches to the sport.

Photos supplied by British Gymnastics

To complement our profiling work, a media day at British Gymnastics HQ gave media the opportunity to interview the gymnasts in person and watch them showcase their skills ahead of the World Championships. We also invited media to try trampolining themselves, after which, one such journalist admitted that whilst trampolinists pull the same sort of G-forces as Formula One drivers, his was ‘more akin to those generated by a stairlift’.

The day was a huge success, attended by journalists from the BBC, The Telegraph, and Sunday Mirror. The resulting coverage led to increased awareness of the sport’s various athletes across regional press including in the likes of BBC Radio Shropshire and ITV Meridian, as well as across both the Sunday Mirror and The Telegraph, as did excitement for Britain’s first home World Championships in 12 years.

The final part of our approach focussed on the announcement of the squad and the subsequent results from the British Championships and the World Championships

which we were quick to distribute to key media both pre and post-competition. Resulting coverage spanned 19 regions of the UK, with standout pieces in the likes of Liverpool Echo and The Yorkshire Post, not to mention additional national hits in the likes of Yahoo! Sport.

Following our work, the governing body commented that ‘trampolining has received more media attention in the last ten days than they had in the last ten years’, proving that our strategy had firmly delivered against the brief of raising media awareness of the sport.