A little background

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is the UK’s leading gardening charity. They aim to enrich everyone’s life through plants and make the UK a greener and more beautiful place. This vision underpins all that they do – from inspirational gardens and shows, through their scientific research, to their education and community programmes. They are committed to inspiring everyone to grow.

In today’s constantly changing landscape, this purpose is more important than ever. As their organisation continues to evolve, The RHS and That Little Agency worked together to understand what it is that makes them a great place to work. To build creative and meaningful marketing to help them engage ten distinct key employment groups.

And help them better tell their employer story.

Our objectives

What The Royal Horticultural Society was looking for was an employer proposition and identity that:

  • Represents the modern RHS
  • Resonates with key recruitment and employee groups
  • Is warm, engaging and inclusive
  • Is centred on the people who work at RHS
  • Talks to more than just gardeners
  • Is flexible enough to be used across all media

We’re talking to people in the know and people who haven’t got a clue what the RHA is. Which means we had to create an employer proposition – or as we call it an employer story – that can as easily connect with a seasoned horticulturist as it can to a 16-year-old coding genius. Who doesn’t like plants. But loves Warhammer.

The research

As part of our insight gathering, we reached out to both employed and non-employed audiences.

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External telephone interviews

We conducted telephone interviews with 70 professionals working within our specific key employee groups.

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Completed external surveys

We surveyed 500 members of the general public of working age.

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Colleague focus groups

We carried out 10 focus groups based around our key employment groups – or cast of characters.

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Senior executive interviews

We conducted interviews with 8 members of the senior executive team.

The RHS employer story

We quickly identified four key themes that each key employment group highlighted – ‘A power for good’, ‘A place to enjoy’, ‘Caring for our people’ and ‘Our future together’. These key themes, or proposition pillars, became our main focus as we developed the overall proposition. Knowing that we could ‘dail up’ or ‘dial down’ these key themes depending on the target audience that RHS were looking to engage. Even more so, we’re able to articulate this in a simple title.

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The creative execution

We have worked closely with the RHS branding and digital teams to review the structure of the careers section of the RHS website. As well as providing a series of images, content and assets that the team have used to update the ‘careers’ section of the corporate website.

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The impact

Having launched in Summer 2022, the ‘Alive with possibility’ employer proposition is still very much in its infancy with the messaging still being rolled out both internally and externally. But we can already see some very encouraging trends. All data has been taken from Google Analytics, the iTrent applicant tracking system and directly from the RHS resourcing team.

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86%

increase in website traffic (per month)

78%

of website traffic from non-paid-for sources (each month)

43%

of website traffic through organic searches on Google (each month)

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21%

increase in applications (per month)

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44%

increase in hires (per month)

The final word

“Our new employer proposition truly captures the unique spirit we live by every day. It’s amazing to see how much the team resonates with this fresh look and feel – both internally and with our candidates. Personally, I’m thrilled about rolling this out even further in 2023 and beyond. It’s not just a new employer brand – it’s a celebration of our story at RHS and everything we stand for. I’m proud to be part of this journey and excited about the many ways we will continue to share our extraordinary employer story with the world.”

Head of Brand
Royal Horticultural Society