| Matanle Public Relations has extensive experience of devising and managing campaigns that bring issues afflicting industry to the attention of UK government departments or public sector bodies and create pressure for change.
For Water Saver Systems,
manufacturers of sealed recirculatory cooling for industry, we made the Department of the Environment aware that water companies were preventing the siting of industries needing cooling beside waterways, despite the availability of cooling that would not damage the waterway. Regulations were changed.
For Private Patients Plan, when the government sought to phase out private medicine, we managed a media campaign, then a parliamentary lobbying campaign, that had a significant effect on subsequent legislation.
For Exhausto Ltd, Matanle PR has managed a campaign to make the public more aware of the safety benefits of chimney fan systems.
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AARDBalm Ltd, based in Essex, appointed Matanle Public Relations to launch and market a new and completely safe material for embalming to replace cancer-causing traditional embalming materials. The funeral direction business is extremely conservative and reluctant to accept that formaldehyde-based embalming products endanger health and that the incidence of malignant brain tumours is far higher among funeral directors than among other professionals. The brief was to:
A) generate public and media interest in the dangers of formaldehyde materials
B) make the public and the funeral industry aware of AARDbalm, a safe alternative embalming material that makes the use of formaldehyde-based materials unnecessary.
Matanle PR decided to use radio and press contact to generate coverage of the dangers, and then to gain access to major trades unions on the back of that coverage to discuss how dangers to funeral workers could be alleviated.
Our client was interviewed on the radio many times, editorial appeared in national and regional newspapers and there was extensive coverage in the environmental and public health press.
Two months after the campaign began, we succeeded in setting up a meeting with the National Secretary of the GMB, the trade union to which most funeral workers in the southern half of Britain belong, and establishing effective contact with USDAW, the union based in Manchester to which most northern funeral workers belong. The GMB allowed itself to be quoted in press releases on the issue and eventually asked the Health and Safety Executive to examine the properties of AARDBalm and report on its safety.
Six months after the campaign began, the Health and Safety Executive reported favourably on AARDBalm, with the result that the trades unions began putting pressure on employers not to use embalming materials that are hazardous to health.
That pressure resulted in government action to limit, and eventually ban, the use of aldehydes in funeral practice, which in turn has resulted in a major funeral group adopting AARDBalm for all its embalming. |