Cities for our future

Capabilities

PR

Date

08/06/2016

2018 marks the 150th Anniversary of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Throughout its history, RICS and the surveyors who are its members have been instrumental in safeguarding and future proofing cities, buildings and land around the world.  Today RICS is a global body with over 200,000 members around the world. 

To celebrate the anniversary and position surveying as an attractive and relevant career for today’s graduates, we created Cities for our Future, a global competition challenging students and young professionals to come up with solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing cities around the world – all for the chance to change the world and take home £50,000.

The VCCP PR team worked alongside our colleagues to deliver a truly integrated campaign to develop and launch the competition, recruit two key partners – UNESCO (UK Commission) and The Association of Commonwealth Universities – and drive entries.

To ensure our campaign was relevant in countries right around the world, we worked alongside regional governments and RICS members to identify 24 problems in different cities spread around the globe.  We worked with RICS teams in each market to launch the competition and assist them in recruiting judges and mentors to advise entrants on how to develop their ideas.  

A strong call to action to enter was communicated with a category-defying campaign across digital, social, print, partnerships and PR. Just six weeks into the competition period we’ve already seen over 100,000 views of our video content and driven over 10,000 visits to the competition website site and media coverage has appeared in a wide range of media outlets across the target markets.  

The campaign will move on to regional judging before a global shortlist and an overall winner are announced later in the year. All of these will provide significant opportunities to generate high profile global media coverage carrying RICS key messages.  The ultimate aim is to partner with city governments and the private sector to pilot one or more of the best ideas from the competition in cities around the world, demonstrating the contribution that RICS and the surveying profession have to play today and tomorrow.   

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