Farmers Weekly

Farmers Weekly

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From photo competitions to Britains Fittest Farmers

What was the starting point?

The Farmers Weekly is a publication aimed at farmers all over the UK.

They have a large, active community and found that the tools they were using to engage their audience were becoming outdated. They didn’t allow them to fully grow and benefit from their loyal followers.

so how do they build a community from User generated content?

Thanks to their readers contributions, FW can gather data and find out previously unknown information about their audience. Using the Contribly tools, FW now know where their audience are sharing their content from, the device they use, what topics they want to be involved in, how to contact them directly and much more. With all this at their fingertips they can now personalise their approach like never before, publish much more content and target their ever-growing communities. 

 

What is the Main objective?

The team behind the publication decided that their old legacy systems needed to be replaced, without losing the thousands of audience images already received and published. The aim being to then build their community and work with sponsors to create new revenue streams.

How did they run sponsored competitions and awards?

FW have teamed up with partners and sponsors to focus on farmers’ physical and mental health. Before, to be nominated for an award, people had to send in an email to the judges and explain why they should be a picked. Now, audiences can apply to a live gallery, and all the stories sent in can be used for daily/weekly articles promoting the competition and the sponsors. The quality of the applications has risen and sponsors can also have access to all that fantastic content.

how did contribly help?

Using the Contribly API the Farmers weekly team were able to transfer all of their content over efficiently, stay in-line with their new website and publish it all instantaneously. From there they then started creating photography competitions on a variety of topics.

 

What are the benefits?

Pulling interactions onto FW pages, has helped them become a platform for their community and made audience engagement take place away from social media. They now have a community that they can target, and the data they need to personalise that experience.

 

Contribly has been ideal for running photo competitions. We have had more than double the usual number of entries this year (over 7,500). It’s certainly down to the ease of use and the fact that you can upload from mobile devices using Contribly. For me, it is much easier to use than the system we had before. Being able to grade submissions, move submissions to other galleries. etc - I’d call it a success!
Oli Hill
Community Editor, Farmers Weekly

Fantastic quality

The quality of the photos that have come in from FW's call-outs have been outstanding throughout. They are used on all of their channels, including print.

3x more competition entries

The photo competitions before using Contribly were not user-friendly, and didn't work on mobile. Since the change FW have received 3x more photos (a total of 5,886 photos in 1 month).

Sponsored awards

Since then FW have used Contribly for sponsored award nominations : Britains Fittest Farmer 2020.

3x more social media engagement

Photos taken by the community that are published on FW's social media pages have 3 times more likes than FW editorial content.