Connecting Cambridgeshire
Educating residents on a landline switch-off.
Call us on 01480 278750
hello@keystone-marketing.co.uk
Peppercorn House
8 Huntingdon Street
St Neots
Cambridgeshire
PE19 1BH
Tag Archive for: landscape
Hayley Williams
I’m responsible for leading the business
Merton Council
Brand identity visuals and messaging built with co-design principles at the core.
Huntingdonshire District Council
Boosting the Huntingdonshire Visitor Economy with truly unique campaign positioning
Godmanchester Mill Steps
Long term, cohesive stakeholder engagement in multi partner environmental project.
Huntingdonshire Day
Celebrating a national day across the district
Becoming an approved Crown Commercial Service supplier and what it means for public sector organisations
Keystone has recently reached a standout landmark by being accepted as an approved supplier to the UK’s Crown Commercial Service. This allows us to offer our services to public sector bodies and organisations on the Crown Commercial Service’s Framework (CCS) Communications Marketplace (RM6124), as well as through the Low Value Procurement Framework.
What buyers get by using the framework?
Procuring through the CCS Framework makes it simpler and faster for UK Government agencies to commission us to deliver a project, because the route to appoint us is already in place and we are pre-validated as an approved framework supplier. Our inclusion on the framework is a guarantee that we fully meet best practice criteria, adhere to public sector procurement rules and are benchmarked for quality and impact – demonstrating that you will receive value for money for the outputs we provide. We can support you on your projects involving communications strategy, campaigns, community engagement, events, PR, messaging or brand development, focusing quickly on the brief in hand, your target audiences and your desired outcomes.
The Communications Marketplace framework offers a clear way to compare capabilities, invite a focused competition where appropriate, and appoint a team that is already aligned to public sector rules. In short, it is a compliant, low-friction route to get your work started sooner.
We are also approved as a supplier on the Low Value Procurement Framework, meaning that low-cost, low complexity communications requirements can also be procured and initiated quickly.
Why this is important to us?
Becoming an approved supplier shows our dedication to the work we provide as well as the high standards that we uphold. It enhances our reputation as a credible and trusted provider and gives assurance to future partners that our credentials have been assessed against rigorous criteria. Ranging from our delivery capability to our financial stability, it demonstrates our qualities and reliability, ensuring that the public sector can procure with confidence.
Keystone Marketing’s Managing Director, Hayley Williams, said:
“For more than a decade, we’ve helped ambitious businesses grow and community-centric organisations bring people together through meaningful engagement. We do that with sharp strategy, innovative ideas and clear and compelling communication that moves people and gets results.
“This recognition of our quality and services from the Crown Commercial Service is a key step for us. It increases our visibility and provides us with an opportunity to extend our reach and support other parts of local government, arm’s length bodies and public sector organisations – not just in our locality but from further afield from our base in St Neots, Cambridgeshire.”
What we can offer you
No matter your sector and whether you’re scaling up, starting out or building trust in your community, we help you reach the people who matter – and build lasting relationships that count.
Enabling businesses, local government and non-profits to foster true engagement with key audiences and activate their communities sits at the heart of our mission. We’re helping to create a future where meaningful marketing drives long lasting relationships and positive impact for organisations and the communities they serve.
Our strength lies in our people. We’re a team of strategic thinkers, problem solvers and opportunity creators – who apply, our creative minds and curious natures to drive meaningful change. Being inquisitive, conscientious, respectful and outcome driven are values we live by.
Our clients tell us they love our energy, and we aim to bring this positivity into every interaction. From crafting compelling marketing strategies to fostering community engagement, each of us brings a unique blend of expertise and passion. Together, we help businesses grow and communities thrive and now being included on the Crown Commercial Service’s communication framework, means we are better placed to do so across the public sector.
Not only that but we are accredited to the Living Wage Foundation as a Living Wage Employer, are Disability Confident Committed and have joined up with The Ethical Move to make marketing more transparent and responsible.
Proven impact in public sector delivery
Our credentials in the public sector are well defined – with local authorities and government agencies alike choosing Keystone to deliver meaningful community engagement. As experienced engagement strategists, we deliver campaigns, consultations and communications that authentically engage and activate communities – including:
- The Connecting Cambridgeshire team at Cambridgeshire County Council – supporting the imminent ‘digital switchover’ where traditional landlines – using copper wires – will be turned off in place of a broadband connection. Our work to create awareness on a local level is part of a wider national campaign to engage with their communities to inform and be supported through change. For other councils who may not have considered the implications of this change or how to communicate with those affected in their locality, we are on hand – now through the CCS Framework, to leverage our expertise on this subject.
- Environment Agency – using storytelling to lift a campaign from information to action, creating messages that resonate rather than wash over people.
- Merton Council in London – where our co-design principles led to the development of a Government-funded Family Hub brand; alongside local Children’s Services teams to launch and embed the new programme into the communities it served.
Ready for the Keystone magic?
Councils and public sector bodies can trigger a new enquiry directly with Keystone through the CCS portal under RM6124. If you are considering your options for an upcoming brief, we would be happy to talk through the routes and share relevant examples. If you are ready to commission now, the framework is your place to start.
Trust is not a tactic
What the digital landline switchover teaches us about community first engagement
When did your landline last ring? Do you even still have one? According to data shared in 2024, 10 years ago 84% of British households had a landline. Now it’s less than half. Precise data is sketchy, but suggests that landline users are predominantly older and more vulnerable. For these people, more often than not, their landline is a lifeline. It provides a connection to loved ones, a means of accessing healthcare, or summoning help in an emergency.
By the end of January 2027, traditional landlines – those using copper wires rather than digital technology – will be switched off. The implications of this “switch off” for older and more vulnerable people aren’t just an inconvenience or a disconnection; it’s a safety issue.
When Cambridgeshire County Council’s digital infrastructure team, Connecting Cambridgeshire, commissioned us to design and launch a local awareness campaign about the upcoming Digital Switchover, they knew our expertise in audience-first strategy and community engagement would be key.
Addressing the elephant in the room
Early on, we knew we were facing a couple of big challenges.
How do you talk about the Digital Switchover with an audience who are likely to experience worry, fear and confusion upon just hearing the word “digital”?
How do you reach vulnerable and older residents, more likely to be living alone, with limited mobility or low digital confidence, and make them aware of a country-wide infrastructural change, that (at the time) the government had shared no plans to promote nationally?
Using our tried-and-tested formula of a deep-dive workshop with the Connecting Cambridgeshire team, followed by internal brainstorming and a ton of creative thinking, we shaped, sculpted, and refined our approach and delivered…
Get ready. Get digital. Stay connected.
Our campaign is laser-focused on the people most at risk of being left behind. Not just from their telecoms services, but from their communities and the people they rely on. We had to ensure that they didn’t just receive the messages, but they understood what to do, and felt supported and confident enough to take action.
If you want their attention, first you must have their trust
Finding the right location to deliver our messages was key. Recognising that trust is the beating heart of community engagement, our strategy was to lean on trusted community spaces, with libraries selected to act as a central hub. This enabled us to cast our campaign messages far and wide.
Posters placed in key community locations frequented by our target audience help to further spread the message
We have stocked the 59 libraries across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough with over 8,000 pieces of printed support materials, to help our key audience prepare for the Digital Switchover.
Securing advertising space on the back of four mobile libraries is taking our main campaign message “Is your landline ready?” to over 500 stops at villages and communities across the district.
From left to right: Will Plant, Digital Inclusion Lead at Connecting Cambridgeshire; Darren Harte, Mobile Library Driver; Katherine Hesketh, Head of Communications at Keystone; and Chantal Palmer, Head of Creative at Keystone.
Build confidence, not just awareness
Raising awareness is only the first step of the campaign. To get to the overall goal of inspiring action – “Contact your phone provider and find out if and how the change affects you” we knew we needed a stepping stone – reassurance. We knew our main audience could feel daunted by rapid technological change and we also knew that misinformation was rife. Our messaging avoids jargon, focuses on empowerment and offers simple but practical support. Gentle encouragement to ask for help from a friend, family or neighbour highlights where support can be gained from trusted sources.
Local organisations have also been equipped with the resources to share the campaign materials within their own networks, again, offering delivery of our campaign messages from a trusted source.
Thanks to a strong visual identity led by our in-house Head of Creative, as well as simple messaging and a community-first approach curated by Keystone’s Head of Communications, we’re helping more people across Cambridgeshire feel ready, confident, and connected for the imminent digital switchover.
How do you know when you’ve got it right?
Recognising that traditional print media is still valued by our core audience, we reached out to over 100 community publications and asked them to include a story about “Get ready. Get digital. Stay connected”. We knew we’d hit the mark with the whole campaign when we received this reply from one editor:
“I think it’s a really important subject, which is of importance and concern to many of our readers”.
Our #1 advice if you’re planning a community engagement campaign?
Craft empathetic messages that will connect with your audience emotionally and deliver them in trusted places.
Do you know someone at risk of being left behind?
Based in Cambridgeshire and want to help your community feel confident and connected too? Ask for our Get ready. Get digital. Stay connected, Stakeholder toolkit.
ICONI
A finely tuned process driven by direct customer insight to help a commercial entity grow
From numbers to narratives
How storytelling helped anglers feel the impact of licence income
Annual Reports.
What’s the first thing that pops into your head? Data? Charts? An inspiring one-pager that offers a “view from the top”? Yawn…
Let’s face it, while there are plenty of businesses bucking the trend, as a piece of marketing collateral, annual reports do still carry a reputation of being a bit dry.
Four years ago, we were asked by the Environment Agency if we could help make their Fisheries Annual Report a bit more interesting. The brief came with some good headlines.
- Every penny from fishing licence sales gets reinvested back into the sport.
- Anglers legally need a licence to fish but in doing so, they are contributing to a whole raft of projects that improves fishing for everyone.
- The benefits of this reinvestment are broad and rooted in strong principles of sustainability.
But for many anglers, a licence is just a necessity. So here was the challenge:
How can we turn this functional transaction into something more emotional that could potentially increase retention, inform and inspire, and ultimately help anglers feel a bit of pride?
We knew a data dump wouldn’t cut it. Anglers didn’t want corporate speak – they wanted connection.
So we turned to storytelling.
Why? Because storytelling is how humans make sense of the world. It’s how we learn, remember, and crucially – care. And that’s where marketing magic comes in. We hooked anglers into the stories that we knew they would resonate with.
For example, in 2023/24 over £22.5 million was raised from licence income. But rather than just stating that, we showed the impact. Nearly 480,000 fish were restocked, rivers revitalised, habitats restored, and young anglers catching their first fish. Suddenly, it’s not just a massive number – it’s a narrative.
Casting a wider net: attention and emotion
Storytelling got us so far. But let’s dive deeper into the psychology.
One of the neuromarketing principles we love is attention – that elusive, expensive resource everyone’s fighting for. People don’t read reports; they skim, scroll, and skip. So we designed content that stood out. Vibrant visuals, digestible layouts, and emotional cues helped to direct the reader’s attention exactly where we wanted it.
We supplied our client not just with a downloadable pdf of the full report, but bite-size ready-to-use social media graphics, ready-made for sharing with the data sliced and diced for easy digestion.
We also tapped into emotion. We wanted the readers to feel something. Pride in how they were supporting conservation. Joy in seeing young people take up angling. Even a bit of outrage at environmental damage, followed by hope when the narrative showed how the Environment Agency was able to respond.
This emotional engagement is key because we know that people’s behaviour isn’t based on logic alone. Emotions move us. And that’s exactly what we wanted – not just awareness, but affinity.
A wonder-fin project collaboration
We enjoyed a wonder-fin collaboration on this project. Keystone crafted the messages and told the stories, while Slade Design created the striking visuals. We knew that their team’s design prowess would help bring our words to life, in a completely unique and powerful way. Three consecutive editions of the Fisheries Annual Report have been produced since that initial brief. We must be doing something right!
A word from our client…
Keystone Marketing provided us an excellent service in helping produce our Fisheries Annual Report. They completed the work efficiently and with care and attention. And ahead of schedule!
Tom Sherwood, Senior Advisor, Environment Agency
Can we help you reel in your audience?
If you’re a brand or public body with a story to tell — especially one that risks being overlooked in a sea of content — we’d love to help you reel in your audience. Whether it’s through storytelling, neuromarketing insights, or just a boatload of good ideas, we can help you unearth that magic hook.
Drop us a line. We promise we don’t bite, but we do love a good pun…