Published by isobel.regan@dontpanicprojects.com
Published Date 24.08.2022 
At SEC Newgate, we create and deliver engaging communications campaigns locally, nationally and internationally. We are an insights and research-driven global strategic communications and advocacy group.
Our property offering is one of the UK’s largest dedicated property PR teams, and over the years we’ve forged a collective of talented individuals across corporate brand, luxury and residential property, commercial real estate, local political and community engagement, and private equity. The team works together to apply a full spectrum of insights, enthusiasm and creativity throughout the entire lifecycle of a project – from concept to completion – to ensure clients achieve their objectives.
What unites every member of the team is our passion for property: we live and breathe real estate and the built environment, and spend our days dedicated to finding creative ways to bring to life properties and places.
We’ve been working with leading developer Ballymore on its major west London scheme, The Brentford Project since February 2019. As a long-term regeneration project, placemaking has been at the heart of our work since the very beginning and is the starting point of everything we do, be it traditional media relations, content creation or the ongoing events programme we craft and deliver.
A key element of this has been to ensure we, alongside Ballymore, bring the existing local community along on the journey, communicate the vision for the revitalisation of the town, and above all, celebrate what’s so great about the area and what’s yet to come.
In 2021, Ballymore challenged us to design an event that specifically targeted families, showing off the family-friendly proposition of The Brentford Project and drive this audience to the development. The brief came in advance of the launch of a new collection of homes, for which this was the primary target demographic.
We centred the concept around a children’s favourite, Halloween, and curated a format based on what has resonated best with the local community previously: a drop-in style day with lots of interactive sessions and workshops. As such, the idea for the Halloween Skele-bration at The Brentford Project was born.
With a fantastic space at hand, we transformed The Brentford Project’s dedicated event space into a spooky ‘haunted house’, complete with cobwebs, coffins, creepy crawlies and scary backdrops.
This gave us the perfect setting for an array of interactive activities and workshops, all designed with kids and families in mind, from face painting and doughnut bobbing through to witchy hoopla and a Halloween-themed buzz wire – all in line of course with the area’s existing strong creative community. Unsurprisingly, one of the most popular activities was pumpkin carving. So popular, in fact, we had to repurpose the mini pumpkins from our decorative displays to use for carving instead.
Having welcomed over 900 guests to The Brentford Project through the day – 400% more than the 150 attendees we’d forecast – the day was a great success. The only downside was the grumpy faces from the children’s who didn’t want to go home…
In the context of the challenges and unpredictability that comes with planning and delivering events post-pandemic, the success of The Halloween Skele-bration at The Brentford Project – and, of course, a shortlisting in the UK Agency Awards – was a reassuring and happy reminder of the importance, value and joy of human connection that face-to-face events bring for both our clients and their audiences.
