Follow The Seed, a national venture capital fund, had two main goals for their PR campaign through Martini Mondays. The first was to educate and enlighten the public regarding the decrease in national funding for start-ups in the 2018 financial year, and the second was to position the brand as being one of the top VC funds in Australia. Why are they different? Because they not only re-invest in follow-on investments, but continuously and actively invest in new start-ups that are seeking funding - changing the game for entrepreneurs by supporting them during a vital time of growth.

The Brief

Given the dual goals of this campaign, we took a two-fold approach to our PR strategy to ensure that we were achieving the client’s objectives as best as possible. From the outset, we worked closely with the client to target their messaging, and strategised the outlets that would best align with the brand. Once we had finalised the media release it was distributed to our selected publications. We then began building relationships with each outlet on behalf of the client, and provided more details on the story where necessary - including setting up interviews between each outlet and our client so they could deliver more specialised information.

The Strategy

We secured features with publications including Finder.com.au, AntHill Online, Entrepreneur.com, StartUpNews, and an exclusive with AFR. With these features, we’ve not only started a discussion within the news community surrounding the decrease in VC funding nationally, but we’ve also gained huge public recognition for Follow The Seed, and how integrated they are when it comes to funding startups.

Throughout each feature we had Follow The Seed’s CEO, Andrey Shirben, comment expertly on the downward trend that we’ve identified, further positioning him as a thought leader in his industry. Moving forward, we have interest from both The Australian and The Australian Financial Review, to feature FTS’s thought-provoking educational pieces in their highly esteemed outlets.

The Result

PR Strategy + Development, Copywriting and Message Development