Sarah Sharkey
Brand, PR & Sponsorship Manager
Give us a brief overview of Electric Ireland as a company in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically.
Electric Ireland is the retail subsidiary of ESB, and a market leader in the highly competitive energy sector in Ireland. In terms of our values and ethos, our organisation has always had a strong sense of corporate citizenship.
As far back as 1927, our founder Thomas McLoughlin had a vision of how electricity would change society for the better – both economically and socially – and this sense of purpose continues to be at the heart of our organisation today.
We are strong believers in the theory that sponsorships fuelled by passion are the ones that deliver success year after year and Electric Ireland are involved in many exciting sponsorships that reflect this ethos. Through our sponsorships, it is our ambition to have a positive impact on the communities within which we operate, whether that is GAA, Darkness Into Light, Young SVP or smaller, grassroots initiatives.
What are you trying to achieve with your sponsorships?
The ongoing challenge for our business is to cut through the price conversation with a compelling brand narrative and a differentiated proposition. Energy is a hot topic right now but historically it’s been a notoriously low-interest category with interest driven mostly by price. Sponsorship plays a pivotal role in how we position our brand and communicate our core values as an organisation.
Alignment with the right property helps to strengthen Electric Ireland’s brand equity, helps drive brand visibility and positively differentiates Electric Ireland from our competitors.
Effective use of sponsorship is a key tool in Electric Ireland’s retention and acquisition strategy, and it contributes to our customer rewards programme, helping create deeper connections between the brand and customer. This helps insure against continued price-focused messaging from competitor brands in what has become an increasingly competitive energy market.
What sporting teams and organisations does Electric Ireland partner with, and how do you go about deciding where to direct your sponsorships?
Our sponsorships are based on three key pillars: Environment, Community and Culture.
Electric Ireland sponsors the GAA Minor Hurling & Football Championships along with the Higher Education Championships. The collective pride in GAA and strong sense of community helps us achieve our community support ambition and is an effective platform for us to engage with a diverse demographic in terms of age and socio-economic status.
Electric Ireland has supported the annual Darkness Into Light fundraising walk in aid of Ireland’s leading suicide-prevention charity, Pieta, since 2013. The sponsorship aligns with our brand purpose of helping to support and enable the communities in which we operate.
How do you activate these partnerships and has the emphasis of your activations changed in recent times?
We have an ethos that any sponsorship property should be inarguably better because Electric Ireland is involved. We focus a lot on Partnership, Potential & Passion and take a ‘roll up our sleeves’ approach, selecting partnerships that offer mutual reward, community impact and the potential for growth.
When Electric Ireland commenced sponsorship of the GAA Minor Championships ten years ago, there was little differentiation in the mind of the public between the 25 GAA sponsors and media partners all vying for a place around the football field.
Electric Ireland set about changing that by creating a sponsorship strategy based on research and audience insights around this incredibly pivotal time in an adolescent’s life. This led to the development of This Is Major, the communications platform we launched in 2014. It is based on the insight that there’s nothing minor about playing Minor GAA for the players, their coaches, their families, and friends – This Is Major.
We bring to life the sponsorship through a comprehensive marketing and PR campaign highlighting the commitment of the players and support of the broader community in helping them realise their successes on and off the pitch.
Activation of the Higher Education and the Minor Hurling and Football Championships usually runs from January to October each year. However, as the majority of 2020 was spent in some form of lockdown, the Minor Championships were postponed.
Knowing we had a robust and dynamic campaign platform with This Is Major, we set about highlighting the wonderful resilience of these young people and the amazing ways they were giving back to their community by raising money for charity, helping the elderly and supporting each other. These were also ‘Major Moments’ and brought to life our brand values of care, trust, passion and drive.
Similarly, we had to reimagine the activation of Darkness Into Light this year as the walk had to be cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions. This posed a huge threat to the single biggest fundraising activity for Pieta at a time when demand for mental health services was very high across the country.
Even though the pandemic was taking its toll, we realised that the sense of community and collective agency was stronger than ever before and from there we launched ‘One Sunrise Together’ to encourage people to share a moment at sunrise, with family or alone.
We created a programme of innovative, educational, and highly emotive content and delivered it across TV, radio, online broadcast and social media. Thankfully the appeal was hugely successful and raised over €7.5m for Pieta.
What can you see happening in the sponsorship industry in the future?
Successful sponsorships have always been good at exploiting natural synergies between the brand and the property, where the brand has an organic role to play in the partnership, and this looks set to continue. Activations that are built on an authentic and credible relationship will be more effective and it will be imperative to measure and demonstrate the impact of successful sponsorship on our brands.
As we move into post-COVID territory, the challenge for sponsorships lies is in how we tell that captivating, cohesive story to audiences using a narrative that resonates and has all the marks of authenticity needed for audience commitment and support. This will apply, I believe, whether it is a game, a community effort or a cultural movement.
