Supporters Update: Launch Week Recap

It’s been a manic few days since launching on Thursday evening. Here are our updates from the past week!

1. Launch at Looking For Growth

The event at the Indigo, O2, had 1,200 in attendance. Joe gave an 8-minute speech to the audience at which he launched the concept. After that, Joe and Shiv talked to a range of high-profile people including Labour’s MP Chris Curtis (chair of Labour Growth Group and MP for Milton Keynes), Tara Sutherland from Ogilvy, and half a dozen other contacts. The event was the perfect place for the launch.

2. Social Media & PR

As of the time of writing, we’ve had over 750k views on Twitter from mainly three tweets, with a huge number of likes (1.1k) and very positive engagement including from high-profile figures like Pieter Levels, whose single quote tweet had more than 120k views.

This has also led to brilliant direct message engagement from great follow-on contacts including former civil servants, VCs, and specialists in other fields including the National Federation of Builders.

On media, we’ve had interviews with two journalists which could lead to publication, plus one editorial by Joe for CapX: “How to Build Britain’s Next Great City”.

3. Website

Joe and Ben (our designer) managed to get the website up and deployed in time — a remarkable achievement in itself. Here are the stats:

6,568 unique people viewed the site 12,077 times with 69% of referrals coming from Twitter. The traffic is very good for just three days given that this is a brand new site and brand. We also managed to design our overview proposal as a PDF which has now been downloaded 546 times.

We’re now the 5th link on Google for “forest city”.

4. Campaign

Our current public campaign goal is to get to 10k signatories for the website pledge. This seems a substantial number to go to ministers with to demonstrate proof of demand. Currently that number stands at 521 signatures — it’s an 8% conversion rate which is very high. In short, our conversion funnel works.

The names are very high-quality signatories: a varied cross-section of professionals. 78 of the signatories either have CEO or Founder as their title. There’s also a YouTuber, a billionaire, the former chair of the Fabians, someone from the Adam Smith Institute, and more.

Furthermore, we have three events planned in London, Cambridge, and Manchester. The London event has a remarkable 240 people already signed up for November 5th.

5. Board and Expert Committee

We’re working on bringing on board members and formalising those relationships. We’re looking to expand our engineering and developer competencies.

We will have a much larger database to build out our expert committee now that we have the pledge signatories. Currently the expert committee tentatively includes six people. We’re also working to ensure better representation on the board and expert committee.

Goal: Formalise and announce at least a 5-member board by the last week of November.

Until next time,
Joe & Shiv