Swansea University Race Engineering 

As part of my degree at Swansea University, students were tasked to form a group for our dissertation where we would work with a company on a year-long project. After meeting and pitching to a number of companies, my group and I were in the advantageous position of being the ideal choice for many of the companies we had shortlisted.

We chose the Swansea University Race Engineering team who compete in the UK and European Formula Student competitions, as we believed their project was an ambitious yet exciting challenge.

There are a number of tasks that we were responsible for over the course of the academic year.

These included:

• Creating a social media plan which the SURE team could implement.
• Redeveloping the SURE website alongside a web design agency.
• Conducting video interviews with members of SURE to use for social media and the website.
• Repurposing content and redesigning SURE’s sponsorship brochure.
• Writing email templates to use as part of our sponsorship cycle.
• Building a database of businesses to approach about sponsorship partnership.
• Securing nearly £25,000 worth of sponsorship, smashing the £10,000 target.
• Writing press releases.
• Developing a five-year marketing plan.
• Creating a roll-out event for the S16 formula student car.
• Designing the pit board for the race events at Silverstone.

Everyone in the team contributed to all the tasks we were challenged with. However, early on in the project, we decided that it would be best if we all had leading roles for certain tasks.

This led me to become the “Head of Sponsors” with the task of finding and creating partnerships which would lead to a £10,000 value of resources being provided to the SURE team, for the year following our appointment. We achieved thousands more than the £10,000 originally asked for.

Additionally, the database of possible sponsors, email sponsor template, and the task of designing a new pit board have all been accomplished through my sole individual efforts while I had heavy involvement in redesigning the sponsorship brochure alongside my team members and a freelance graphic designer.

I have also contributed heavily to social media, including researching effective ways to reach audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. One of the findings from my research was that video and posting video natively to each platform were key trends in the year of 2015.

This finding led us to create video content (in the form of team interviews) which we could use as social media content. I conducted the video interviews in December 2015 where I adopted the role of interviewer and were published in the month of April, leading up to this seasons race car rollout event which was a huge success.

Additionally, the redevelopment of the website has been completed. My main involvement was with the overall one-page layout and design, as well as shaping the content for the “About Us” page. Below are before and after screenshots of the SURE website.