Website – Sarah Folan

Great Lighthouses of Ireland

An all-island tourism initiative, Great Lighthouses of Ireland is the consumer-friendly face of the country’s coastal guardians, Commissioners of Irish Lights.

Copywriting, Content & Campaign Management

Since 2015 I’ve been copywriting, content managing and curating content campaigns for this evocative lighthouse brand. Showcasing the visitor experiences and overnight accommodation options on offer to consumers across its 14 lighthouses/lighthouse attractions, through inspiring content I cast the spotlight towards these coastal beams.

The website’s countless stories have delved into everything from the duties of lightkeepers back in the day, to just where you can fill your social feed with like-worthy snaps.

Content campaigns have included the NI Heritage Lottery Fund ‘Legends of the Lighthouse‘ film bursary, a charity storybook initiative, an online Christmas shop in the wake of COVID-19 and the unprecedented Young Storykeepers writing initiative.

Young Storykeepers

In May 2020, Great Lighthouses of Ireland and Fighting Words asked children and young people to create lighthouse-inspired stories during COVID-19 lockdown. I devised the Young Storykeepers content campaign which ran across the website and its social channels from May – December 2020. I crafted strategic social posts and curated bespoke landing pages and imagery for the content, including video assets, to live on.

I also managed the creation of print assets launching the initiative in the Irish Times, curated the imagery for a free downloadable colouring book, selected and sourced all the campaign imagery.

This campaign helped garner over 1,200 children’s submissions – resulting in a five-volume digital magazine showcased on the site.

Online Christmas Shop

I curated and created a bespoke landing page and individual offers for the website’s online Christmas shop in 2020. This showcased products and experiences available to buy from the brand’s partners despite the COVID-19 lockdown in place.

A series of strategic social posts were devised for promotion

Creative Ireland | Cruinniú na nÓg

Ireland is the first, and only, country in the world to have a national day of free creativity for children and young people under 18.

Under the Government’s Creative Ireland initiative and in partnership with the country’s 31 local authorities and RTÉ, this annual creative day – Cruinniú na nÓg – sees thousands of parents, families and young people enjoy a variety of fun, free, creative activities nationwide.

As a member of the creative content team for the Cruinniú na nÓg 2019 campaign, I was tasked with shining a spotlight on this national day of youthful creativity through copywriting, website and social media management.

Getting creative with content

Taking the idea that if you can’t see it, you can’t be it, the campaign amplified this message by placing young people and recognisable ‘Creative Heroes’ together in a series of social outputs, TV ads, social posts, articles, Instagram takeovers and photography.

For the Cruinniú na nÓg website, I wrote 15 articles (such as What’s on in Leinster, 12 Unmissable Events) previewing the day and driving user engagement, and drafted hundreds of unique event listings to boot.

I also profiled up and coming creatives like theatre-maker Dylan Coburn Gray, slam poet Natalya O’Flaherty, illustrator Cathal Duane and inclusive enterprise Izzy Wheels; in a revealing Creative Q&A series.

With children at the heart of the initiative, the campaign featured three young people as Creative Ambassadors. I showcased their creative habits and personal inspiration with short biographies on the website.

Showcasing on social

Part of the social team strategising the showcase of Cruinniú na nÓg’s web content and video outputs, I helmed the social management tool Falcon for a month-long awareness and engagement campaign.

A series of stylin’ social posts were shot and posted, like these ones featuring designers Nuala Goodman and Helen Steele.

Throughout the big day itself, I manned Creative Ireland’s Twitter account, live posting the video and imagery the campaign team were capturing in real time nationwide. These enthusiastic, reactive posts generated great user engagement and helped #CruinniúnNaÓg, #CruinniúToCreate and #MyCruinniú trend on Twitter all day.

The campaign was a massive success. In 2018 (which I had also content managed) there were 500 events registered on the website. In 2019, that number had grown to 780 – an increase of 56%. In total, the campaign’s content saw 1,350,708 completed video views across the website and social channels – an increase of over 600% on 2018’s views of 231,601.

On the event day itself, #CruinniúNanÓg trended on Twitter and audience participation was up 10% on the previous year

Cruinniú na nÓg, as well as a number of other Creative Ireland initiatives, also contributed to the programme being shortlisted as one of Europe’s most innovative citizenship projects at the prestigious European Innovation in Politics Awards in Berlin.

Wild Atlantic Way | Star Wars Campaign

What if an audience from outside of Ireland were invited to embrace the famed Wild Atlantic Way of life? Say, an audience from a galaxy far far away?

To coincide with the release of the hugely anticipated eighth Star Wars instalment, 2017’s Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, the Wild Atlantic Way stepped into the limelight in Fáilte Ireland’s atmospheric and intergalactic content campaign.

Out of this world

For the Wild Atlantic Way site I co-wrote the content for an extraterrestrial-themed landing page – perfectly suited to the intergalactic enthusiast, the Star Wars fan and the potential west coast tourist alike.

With Star Wars mania reaching fever pitch and as several Wild Atlantic Way hotspots were to feature in the film, myself and the content team at bigO devised this Star Wars-specific landing page to brim with unique, out-of-this-world content.

With the overall campaign’s highlight an otherworldly cinema ad, the website’s written content followed the ad’s unusual concept. That being that the Wild Atlantic Way is so exceptional that even visitors from outer space want to make the journey. On this landing page, users were not only greeted with evocative descriptions and stunning imagery, they could also, at the touch of a button, translate this content into a strange alien language. Why? For interplanetary kicks, of course.

A not so Lonely Planet

Anchoring the user’s space-themed visit were a number of hero articles that mixed tongue-in-cheek humour and practical information with incredible imagery guaranteed to give people the travel bug.

“The underwater ambassador in these parts is a ‘dolphin’ (/ˈdɒlfɪn/) named Fungie and is a very welcoming being indeed.”

A Space Traveller’s Guide to the Wild Atlantic Way, which I co-wrote, introduces the concept of the Wild Atlantic Way and its earthly charms to would-be tourists from other galaxies.

While my Intergalactic Itinerary gave the inside track on which headlands were recently home to Jedi temples and which coastal corners doubled as distant planets.

“The Force was felt as far south as West Cork too when beautiful Brow Head near Crookhaven was the site of much filming buzz. Roam the landscape and you’ll soon discover why it provided such interstellar inspiration.”

Ireland 2016 Centenary Website

Being Irish is more complicated, more diverse and more interesting than we might sometimes acknowledge.

The 2016 Easter Rising centenary commemorations offered an opportunity to explore these intricacies with a once-in-a-lifetime invitation to everyone.

Unsurprisingly, by late 2015 with the centenary year looming, economic storms, divisive violence and ideological hijacking had left many of us feeling uneasy or apathetic about where our place was in these upcoming commemorations.

Words and website

Helming the Government’s metaphorical centenary shopfront, what was then Ireland.ie, my role as the site’s content manager and writer meant that every word, image and subheading had to be deliberated over and viewed from every angle.

Working with creative/production agency bigO, I had a compact team of junior writers to manage and a keen understanding of our duty to write potentially politically-charged content with a distinctly neutral voice. Manoeuvring around missteps was a daily task. And that was before departmental approval, Irish language translations and actual content publishing even came into it.

The website content I wrote, managed and curated over late 2015 and into the whole of 2016 was engaged with and shared at home and abroad. At the centenary’s height, Ireland.ie saw almost one and half a million visits.

1,000s of events, 100s of stories, two languages

With the Ireland 2016 Programme Team engaging with partners such as local authorities, government agencies and cultural and educational institutes, the centenary’s enormous calendar of events was a daunting one to represent online. Added to that, the fact that every piece of content had to be translated into Irish – delivered to the translators via a special CMS plugin, and then uploaded and published separately; every task was really two rolled into one. And every tweak to copy? Well, that really had to be worth making and sending back for translation.

Over the lifespan of the project, I liaised daily with the Department’s internal team and stakeholder partners to write, source imagery for and upload the 1,000+ commemorative event descriptions that took place worldwide, from Ahascragh to Australia.

Delving into the archives

The website’s flagship content was the 100+ historic stories and engaging news items I researched, wrote and curated across the year. With incredible access to the eyewitness statements, personal letters and military accounts in Óglaigh na hÉireann’s Military Archives, I was able to shine a light on the Rising leaders’ poignant Last Letters, Last Words with specially crafted content.

Through detailed research and generous access to imagery from the National Library of Ireland, I also curated content remembering the 40 civilians under the age of 16 who lost their lives in the Rising’s conflict with The Children of 1916.

To coincide with the anniversaries of the Rising leaders’ deaths, I created the commemoration-specific landing page, The Executed, and wrote subtle but emotive copy in remembrance. Each piece of content was published on the individual anniversary, meaning the page was populated day by day – adding to the content’s impact.

The website content was also kept fresh by commissioning several articles from well-known historians, writers and academics across the year.

During the height of the commemorations at Easter 2016, Ireland.ie received a staggering 1.25 million page views

I also scripted a number of the Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme’s many videos, commemorating a wealth of historic moments and initiatives, from important dates to cultural events.

Awards

The Ireland.ie site won the Best in Public Service award at the 2017 Digital Media Awards; and both Best Arts and Culture Website and Best Website in Ireland at the Realex Web Awards 2016.