BBC Dig In

Located under BBC Big Screens in City Centres and at key gardening shows, these 16 events offered visitors the chance to experience some of the key messages from the Dig in Campaign, notably sowing their own vegetable seeds in seed pots made from recycled paper, creating easy recipes from the produce and exchanging tips with other gardeners.

Keystone researched and sourced an ice‐cream van which was ‘wrapped’ in campaign branding. We then went on to run the activities at the events ensuring maximum participation by the target audience; families with young children under 10.

We liaised with BBC Big Screen Managers to ensure that there was interactive content on the screens to coincide with our visits. These included the CBeebies Dig In song, Dig in Information films and camera relay allowing our young participants to see themselves live on screen. We delivered and installed the ice‐cream van and the ‘Dig In garden’ to city centres and selected garden shows, including BBC Gardeners’ World Live at the NEC, Birmingham. We were responsible for liaison with city councils and/or show organisers and for all aspects of health and safety.

We arranged with the BBC for delivery, storage and collation of 50,000 each of 5 different seed packets, stickers and booklets, plus a further 50,000 recipe cards for the cooking phase and ensured that every one of these was distributed at the events, averaging over 2,000 per day. We liaised with the local BBC PR manager to ensure maximum publicity in regional press and fed back photographs and ‘top tips’ from the events to the website editor to ensure the website was kept updated. We also liaised with the Gardeners’ World team to ensure maximum coverage of the van and our activities on BBC Two.