Project: business-facing communication campaign
The Skills Advisory Group from the Scotland Food & Drink Partnership initially engaged Hoolet to devise and deliver a nine-month initiative to support employers in the industry. The Feeding Workforce Skills project promotes existing support available for food & drink employers to recruit, retain and develop their workforce.
Since then, it’s grown and evolved as dynamic and engaging content continues to pour out of this successful partnership every year.
How the Feeding Workforce Skills project keeps a vital industry message fresh
Meet the client
The Scottish food & drink industry is a cornerstone of the national economy, yet it faces persistent challenges around recruiting, retaining and developing talent.
Trying to find, keep, and train great people is a constant battle, especially for those smaller businesses running flat out without a dedicated HR team. The worst part? All the support they need is out there, but it’s scattered everywhere.
The Scotland Food & Drink Partnership’s Skills Advisory Group came to us with a brilliant idea: stop making it complicated.
They needed a sharp, cohesive campaign – a smart, low-effort tool – to cut through the noise and prove to employers that becoming an employer of choice is achievable. That’s why we built Feeding Workforce Skills (FWS), a partnership that’s only grown stronger over the following years.
How we helped: The evolution of a campaign
The original Feeding Workforce Skills project had two main objectives over nine months:
- to create a simple online resource that clearly signposts areas of support.
- to run regular campaigns throughout the period that looked at different ways to Feed Workforce Skills – from recruitment to retention, upskilling to apprenticeships, all of which led back to the online resource.
This initial phase was all about awareness and establishing a strategic anchor point for the campaign.
Our first task was to find all the relevant information that existed from different credible sources, then structure that complex information into four simple pillars and created an online hub, successfully signposting multiple sources of support onto one platform.
Since that foundation was laid, we have devised ways to build on the success without rehashing old ideas.
We have shaken things up, speaking to real businesses, industry leaders and given them their own voices, all while pointing to the resources that help employers Feed their Workforce’s Skills.
This has allowed the campaign to evolve organically.
Phase 2: highlighting pathways through video content
To challenge the perceptions of apprenticeships, we created the “Apprentice for a Day” video series.
We asked six top industry leaders to trade their CEO suits for the workplace of an apprentice. This powerful human-focused content highlighted career progression, different sectors (from aquaculture to butchery) and regions across Scotland, generating authentic, high-quality video content that is a valuable – and reusable – asset.
Stand up and take a bow:
- Scotland Food & Drink CEO Iain Baxter at Kettle Produce in Fife
- Tavish Scott, CEO at Salmon Scotland at Mowi near Oban
- Quality Meat Scotland CEO Sarah Millar visited Scott Brothers in Dundee
- Food & Drink Federation Scotland CEO David Thomson also took the technical route became a maintenance engineering apprentice at Devro in North Lanarkshire
- Seafood Scotland CEO Donna Fordyce was in Moray at Associated Seafoods
Hoolet project managed, co-ordinated, interviewed, filmed, edited and promoted all the content.
Phase 3: life skills through the lens of a podcast
The “Feeding Workforce Life Skills” campaign included a three-part podcast series looking at those all-important life skills. This format allowed different voices to share views and opinions in conversations that shone a spotlight on the challenges and lessons learned around life skills. It provided new angles, featuring nine subjects across three themes: leaders, existing employees and the next generation.
Again, Hoolet project managed, co-ordinated, interviewed, recorded, edited and promoted all the subsequent content.
Phase 4: the image and attractiveness of a career in food & drink
The campaign is now moving into public-facing communications, focused on enhancing the image and attractiveness of the sector. This involves consulting and distilling the key messages – that it is a rewarding place to work, where you can make a difference and there truly is a job for everyone – to be used in a new strategy targeting career influencers and securing the future talent pipeline.
Throughout this evolution, Hoolet has also provided complementary resources, from designing classroom learning resources (like the Building a Burns Supper teaching resources) to real life talent spotlights to celebrate Careers Week or refreshing previous content to make it relevant for annual celebrations such as Scottish Apprentice Week.
The assets and angles are new, but they reinforce the same key message: the importance of feeding workforce skills.
The Find Your Future in Food toolkit contains statistics, case studies, career route maps as well as a short promotional video outlining why people should choose a career in food & drink (click image on far right below to watch).
Building a Burns Supper is a relaunched version of a much-loved teaching resource based on a Burns Supper.
Originally created by Developing the Young Workforce, the range of resources from employers and partners showcases careers in the food & drink and land-based industries.
It is designed to help young people understand where our national food & drink comes from – click to download a copy.
The highlights
Successfully delivering Feeding Workforce Skills has meant acting as the communications anchor for a complex and diverse group of stakeholders and partners.
We translate technical skills support into accessible, engaging formats, making the information relevant to time-pressed business owners.
Making the complex simple: we structured a vast amount of technical information from different credible sources into four simple pillars and created an online hub.
Creating authentic content: we loved using compelling case studies from businesses such as North Uist Distillery and Mossgiel Farm, and tailing industry leaders as they shadowed talented apprentices.
Driving engagement: we secured opinion pieces in mainstream media (Scotsman, Courier, Press & Journal), and drove engagement through vital buy-in from multiple stakeholders, leveraging their networks for wider distribution.
The legacy
The initial first phase established the campaign in the minds of the industry. In the first three months, the new online resource saw 2,000 pages viewed through organic means alone. Campaign activity resulted in 1,676 total link clicks, demonstrating that the promotional material successfully drove traffic to specific support resources.
The evolution of the campaign has created a lasting legacy:
- Legacy resources: the Apprentice for a Day videos and the Life Skills podcast series created a high-quality, reusable library of content that continues to promote the value of training and soft skills development to the sector.
- Content for everyone: We have waved the flag for winners of the Young Talent award and the SFD’s flagship Excellence Awards and refreshed a toolkit called “Find a Future in Food”. As well as career maps and qualification demystifiers, it has six case studies highlighting student, apprentices, career changers and showing how there really is a job for everyone.
Hoolet founder Joanna Fraser said: “We understood that speaking to a time-pressed audience with competing demands meant we had to get the value across clearly and engagingly.
“By focusing on authentic content and getting buy-in from the core partnership and stakeholders, we built a project that was not just a ‘nice to have’, it delivered actionable support to businesses where they needed it most.”
Feedback
Moira Stalker – FDF Scotland Skills Manager, and People and Skills Lead for Scotland Food & Drink Industry Strategy – said: “Hoolet’s real skill lies in their ability to act as a strategic anchor, turning complex industry information into genuinely engaging content that a time-pressed audience can actually use.
“They don’t just deliver a campaign, they can evolve it creatively, consistently finding new angles and formats – from videos to podcasts – to keep the core message fresh and relevant year after year.
“This approach has built us a lasting library of high-quality resources, which is an invaluable asset for securing the future talent pipeline in our industry.”
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