How Kidztivity secured 21 media placements through parenting and children’s activity PR
Chris Sharman, Kidztivity
Parenting and children’s activity expert PR
Kidztivity wanted to raise its profile in the children's activity sector while making greater use of founder Chris Sharman's expertise in children's sport, physical activity and family participation.
The business had a strong foundation for media work. Kidztivity provides training, programmes, workshops and consultancy for organisations and professionals working with children, while Chris brought decades of practical industry experience that could be applied to everything from parenting and children's fitness to behaviour, sport and activity provision.
Over a nine-month PR campaign, we developed a mix of expert-led commentary, seasonal parenting angles and proactive company news. Across the supplied campaign records, this resulted in 21 unique published media placements across 15 media brands, including The Independent, The Times, HuffPost, The i Paper, Yahoo, MSN, Netmums and Women's Fitness.
The client
Kidztivity is a specialist children's activity business providing training, programmes, workshops and consultancy to organisations and professionals working with children and young people.
The business describes itself as the home of children's activities, with services designed to help providers improve their programmes, develop staff and engage more children. Kidztivity is a CIMSPA Training Provider and says its community includes more than 1,000 children's businesses and professionals.
Founder Chris Sharman brought a particularly useful media profile to the campaign. His experience spans children's activities, sport, physical activity, fitness, programme development and the training of professionals working with children, giving us a broad range of credible subjects on which to position him as an expert.
The objective
The primary objective was to build greater awareness and credibility for Kidztivity while establishing Chris as a useful expert source for journalists covering parenting, families, children's activity, sport and fitness.
Rather than relying only on stories about Kidztivity itself, the campaign needed to make the business relevant to the wider national conversation around how children play, exercise, develop and engage with sport.
This gave us two complementary PR routes: use Chris's expertise to contribute to journalist-led features, while also identifying genuine Kidztivity developments that could become proactive news stories.
The strategy
We built the campaign around several areas where Kidztivity had genuine authority.
Chris could offer practical, accessible advice to parents on subjects such as encouraging children to exercise, sports-day pressure, children wanting to quit sport, holiday boredom and keeping children active as the evenings became darker.
At the same time, Kidztivity had its own business and sector developments that could be pitched proactively, including its role in the national Grandparents Welcome campaign and later developments around standards within the children's party industry.
This allowed us to alternate between expert commentary, advice-led features, seasonal stories and business news, rather than trying to force one message repeatedly.
Turning specialist expertise into mainstream parenting coverage
One of the strongest parts of the campaign was translating Chris's professional experience into advice that was immediately useful to parents.
An article in The Independent on exercising as a family positioned Chris directly as a children's activity expert and founder of Kidztivity. His advice was used throughout the feature, covering how parents can make movement enjoyable, lead by example, give children greater ownership over activities and focus on skill-building rather than performance.
The same broad expertise opened opportunities around other common parental concerns.
The Times featured commentary around whether parents should allow a child to quit team sports, while HuffPost UK covered the pressure parents can inadvertently place on children during sports day.
Later in the campaign, another HuffPost opportunity looked at whether an excessive focus on competition could actually push children away from sport.
The result was that Chris was not being presented simply as someone promoting a children's activity business. He was being used as an independent expert source on issues affecting parents and children.
Using the calendar to create repeatable media opportunities
Parenting and children's activity is particularly suited to seasonal PR, and we used that throughout the campaign.
Summer created several different routes into the media.
A sports-day angle around why parents should not push children to win generated coverage across HuffPost UK, Yahoo Lifestyle UK, Yorkshire Live and the wider Reach network.
Summer holiday content then moved the campaign into another parental concern: keeping children occupied and active during the long school break.
Advice around holiday boredom was featured by The i Paper and subsequently appeared on MSN, while Parents News covered advice on phrases parents may want to avoid when children complain that they are bored.
As autumn approached, the focus shifted again. Kidztivity secured coverage around keeping children active as evenings became darker, while another feature looked at signs that a child may be struggling at school.
This approach helped keep Chris relevant without repeatedly pitching journalists variations of the same story.
Building authority beyond reactive commentary
We also wanted the campaign to demonstrate Kidztivity's own role within the children's activity industry.
When Kidztivity became an official training partner for the national Grandparents Welcome campaign, we turned the development into a proactive media story.
The initiative was designed to encourage grandparents to participate more actively in grandchildren's preschool and extracurricular activities. Kidztivity's role centred on providing training and expertise to activity providers, while Chris joined working groups supporting the project.
The story secured coverage through the Southern Daily Echo and Yahoo, creating a different type of visibility from the advice-led parenting coverage.
That mattered because it helped establish Kidztivity not only as a source of expert opinion, but as an organisation actively involved in developments within its sector.
Reaching consumer, parenting and specialist media
The campaign did not depend on one category of publication.
Coverage appeared across major national and consumer outlets including:
The Independent
The Times
HuffPost
Yahoo
The i Paper
MSN
It also reached highly relevant parenting and family audiences through titles including:
Netmums
Parents News
and extended into fitness and consumer media through:
Women's Fitness
that's life!
Regional and business coverage, including Southern Daily Echo, Yorkshire Live, the Reach network, London Daily News and Insider, provided additional routes for company and sector stories.
That breadth was useful because Kidztivity needed to reach more than one audience. Parents were important, but so were children's activity professionals, businesses and organisations operating within the wider sector.
The results
Across the campaign records, Fair PR secured 21 unique published media placements.
One duplicate database entry for the same Parents News article has been excluded from that total.
The coverage represented approximately 15 distinct media brands, after consolidating different labels or editions belonging to the same publication family.
The campaign included 15 unique online placements recorded with backlinks, four additional online placements without backlinks, and two print appearances.
Several individual ideas also generated multiple pieces of coverage.
The sports-day story alone appeared across HuffPost UK, Yahoo Lifestyle UK, Yorkshire Live and the Reach network. The Grandparents Welcome announcement generated Southern Daily Echo and Yahoo coverage, while the summer holiday boredom angle appeared in The i Paper and MSN.
This combination meant the campaign generated both standalone high-authority features and wider amplification when particular stories travelled across multiple outlets.
The outcome
The Kidztivity campaign demonstrates how specialist expertise can be turned into a much broader media platform.
Rather than limiting PR to company announcements, we used Chris Sharman's knowledge of children's activity, sport and family participation to place Kidztivity into conversations already taking place in national, parenting, lifestyle and fitness media.
At the same time, genuine company developments gave us opportunities to promote Kidztivity itself and reinforce its position within the children's activity sector.
Over the nine-month campaign, that approach produced 21 unique published placements across 15 media brands, with coverage spanning national newspapers, parenting titles, lifestyle media, fitness publications, regional news and business media.
| Result | Details |
|---|---|
| Campaign | Parenting, family and children's activity PR |
| Campaign length | 9 months |
| Expert(s) | Chris Sharman, Founder of Kidztivity |
| Primary objective | Build awareness of Kidztivity and position Chris Sharman as a credible media expert on children's activity, parenting, sport and family participation |
| PR approach | Expert commentary, seasonal parenting stories, proactive business news and thought leadership |
| Published media opportunities | 21 unique published placements across the supplied campaign records |
| Publication titles | 15 distinct media brands after consolidating publication and edition variants |
| Selected publications | The Independent, The Times, HuffPost, The i Paper, Yahoo, MSN, Netmums, Women's Fitness, Parents News, Southern Daily Echo and Insider |
| Backlink profile | 15 unique online placements recorded with backlinks, alongside four online placements without backlinks and two print placements |
| Campaign focus | Children's physical activity, parenting advice, family fitness, children's sport, school and holiday wellbeing, sector partnerships and Kidztivity business news |
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