Case studies

Amnis

The positive coverage we have gained through Footprint Communications has resonated with our clients and given us a really supportive media environment in which to drive forward our marketing activities
Mark Eaton, Managing Director

Making change happen is an everyday task for Amnis. The company specialises in enabling quality and performance improvement for organisations in both industry and the public sector.  Clients typically want to boost their efficiency and transform the way they design and deliver services to their customers.

Overview

Amnis boasts a team of highly experienced practitioners, all skilled in flexible approaches to Lean, strategic change and project management and they have built an impressive client base spanning healthcare, manufacturing, housing, retail, logistics, transport and all levels of government. 

Amnis approached Footprint in 2010 with a media relations brief after recognising that its rapid growth was not being matched by its PR profile and that more could be done to highlight its success and spread the word.

What we did

We agreed with Amnis that there were great stories to tell that would help reinvigorate its presence in the media, especially in healthcare, housing and government.   We set about:

• Ensuring the name Amnis was top of mind among key journalists. As well as detailed audits of titles in each target sector, we researched and pitched in story angles and set out to cultivate and maintain good contact with news and feature desks.
• Pitching Amnis’s comments into a series of titles on the potential for Lean management to help with cost efficiencies off the back of speculation over the coalition government’s first Comprehensive Spending Review and acknowledgements that spending cuts were on their way. We also issued press releases on research that Amnis had carried out, for example on how Lean could support approaches to patient safety in the NHS.
• In support of Amnis announcements, we arranged face-to-face meetings in London with journalists and provided feature contributions and opinion pieces.
• We also offered recommendations on sponsorship, award entries and closer working with industry associations.

The outcome

• Coverage of Amnis has appeared in a wide variety of titles including the industry leading Health Service Journal. It has published a series of contributed articles by Managing Director Mark Eaton and included regular Amnis content on its online resource centre for practitioners and NHS managers. This exposure has specifically raised Amnis’s profile among NHS Trusts and other health bodies.
• Amnis has also reached out to managers of GP practices and consortia through regular engagement with the magazine Practice Business and others.
• In the housing press, Amnis provided a well-received comment piece in Housing Technology. It followed work with a housing association on improving the efficiency of gas safety checks, an issue of some concern in the sector.
• In line with the impact of the ‘age of austerity’, Amnis comment pieces and news stories have appeared in public sector media, providing thought-leading input to discussions of the spending cuts facing local and central government.
• Offering a very niche service, Amnis targets a small number of key titles and has achieved 12 quality pieces of coverage across this focused media list, with an OTS of 1,672,500. While these are fairly modest figures, the audience that this media attracts is on target.
  As a reflection of the impact this level of coverage can achieve, Amnis saw a number of immediate benefits including an existing client purchasing a further programme of support valued in the tens of thousands of pounds, four new business enquiries, a 15-fold increase in the number of people registering for the Amnis newsletter (which itself leads to regular business enquiries).
• All coverage has helped to reflect and promote Amnis’s credentials as a leading expert in quality and performance improvement for a wide range of organisations.