Eleven is 11

11 years ago, we launched as a small graphic design studio called GTCreate. We had a change of direction in May 2011 when our Managing Director Clare was appointed. Clare used her public sector background to establish a new sales strategy – focused on bidding for public sector tenders, specifically creative framework contracts.

With the first one (Trafford Council) under her belt, Clare hit the ground running. We began to build up a portfolio of education and local authority clients, adding the likes of the University of Huddersfield, Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, Newcastle University, Bolton Council and Lancaster University to our mix. Working solely with these large organisations meant GTCreate could align its entire service delivery to meet the needs of these types of clients.

We started to find ourselves faced with opportunities to broaden our service to offer the full marketing mix, beyond that of a traditional design studio. And so our agency upskilled and went after bigger framework contracts, adding national clients like WRAP and Network Rail to our rapidly growing portfolio.

Now that our offer had changed, it was also time for us to change. So, in 2015 GTCreate rebranded to Eleven Marketing & Communications – a fully-integrated marketing agency for the public and third sector. Our agency continued to grow, with more incredible clients joining us such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission and National Institute for Health Research.

And in 2019, we had a realisation. That whilst Eleven is indeed an agency for the public and third sector, the driver behind this isn’t a practical one – it’s a question of purpose. The team sat down and collectively agreed to put our marketing expertise to good use by choosing only to work with people and organisations that make a positive impact on society. And so, the marketing for good mantra was born.

So here we are, 11 years later - a purpose-driven marketing agency helping solve the everyday marketing challenges of the public sector, not for profit organisations and for-profit businesses who want to do more good.

We’ve worked on some fantastic campaigns and projects for our clients over the years, having collaborated with some of the UK’s largest organisations across government, transport, housing, education, healthcare, charities and beyond.

One particularly exciting project from the past year was a graduate recruitment campaign we created for Network Rail. We’ve worked with Network Rail on their recruitment campaigns for over 5 years and more recently we were commissioned to create a fully integrated, multi-channel, national, new entrant recruitment campaign, unifying their apprentice and graduate activities. We conducted some research and created a brand campaign value of ‘putting people first’ based on brand engagement from target audiences.

We rolled the campaign out across digital advertising, social media content, animation, video, and event stands, as well as brochures, posters and flyers. From our network of technical specialists, we appointed a specialist character animator for the animations, a virtual reality specialist to create a VR experience, and a brand filmmaker to film the videos for us. The impact is that applications received are up year on year.

And then in January 2020, we worked with Wiltshire Council to create a new identity for their fostering service and to plan, deliver and manage a foster carer recruitment campaign. The council was facing a shortage of foster carers and needed to recruit 100 foster carers over a three-year period.

Once we’d facilitated stakeholder engagement meetings and conducted focus groups with existing foster carers to understand their motivations for fostering, we were able to create a clear campaign strategy and concept, called ‘every day matters’. The campaign was about the positive impact fostering can have on foster carers, their families and cared for children and young people, every day. We planned our implementation to bring the idea to life by identifying ‘everyday’ family scenarios that the target audience can relate to. In just 6 weeks, we drove 208 genuine enquiries from potential foster carers, with 91 people downloading the brochure. This resulted in 30 applications.

You can discover more about the wide variety of exciting projects we’ve worked on over the years by heading over to our case studies.