A digital storytelling campaign that places corporate responsibility at its heart. How RELX transformed its communications strategy.

RELX is a FTSE 15 information and analytics group. The company has navigated a rapid print to digital revolution and has transformed to become a leading global provider of analytics and decision tools. In the process, RELX has successfully embedded corporate responsibility (CR) into the heart of the business. CR underpins our business strategy. To convey this radical transformation, RELX used storytelling techniques to articulate its messages to journalists and generate earned media. Earned media was not enough. We wanted to build an audience and target employees, investors, policy makers and the media, in a more systematic and cost-effective way, to further advance recognition for RELX as a business that creates positive outcomes for society. While earned media remained important, an owned media strategy was developed around a digital storytelling tool called Shorthand.

Shorthand is a parallax storytelling platform. Success with this tool was limited at first, but the team doubled down and created human interest and CR-focused business stories. Over a period of 18 months, we increased the frequency of published stories and started microtargeting our audiences with social media. Eventually a powerful model was found.

This submission tells how RELX has used a digital storytelling tool to create engaging CR stories and successfully build an audience. In the last year, we have seen a thirteenfold increase in average number of reads for our published stories and a significant jump in employee net promoter scores. RELX's CR corporate communications strategy has been transformed, with digital storytelling at its heart.