Started as an online community for mothers (and fathers!) living in the Birmingham area, the Brummie Mummies network engages local families through a newsletter, a podcast and on social media.
Birmingham Live first started its online network for parents in the UK’s Midlands region in 2015. Called “Brummie Mummies” – “Brummie” being a term for someone from Birmingham – the initiative aims to bring together local families and help them keep up to date with family-friendly activities in the region.
In addition to a section on the Birmingham Live website, Brummie Mummies features a weekly newsletter and a podcast, with new episodes released every two weeks. It also has active social media profiles on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The Brummie Mummies audience initiative is run by Zoe Chamberlain, Parenting Editor at Birmingham Live. Her role is entrepreneurial in the sense that it includes both content and commercial aspects: she has, for example, sold sponsorships to the podcast.
Pre-Covid, Brummie Mummies also organised social events, allowing parents and families to meet up in real life. Live events have been on pause since the start of the pandemic, but the team hopes to bring them back in 2023 through a partnership approach.
Taking the parenting community to the next level
When Birmingham Live joined Table Stakes Europe, the team soon decided that the publisher’s existing parenting community was an excellent test case for learning more about audience-specific content and how to build a two-way relationship with a community.
“Using Brummie Mummies as a case study in Table Stakes enabled us to really focus on what our audience wants from us. We concentrated on ways to increase subscribers to the list and also how to re-engage customers who had become inactive for various reasons,” says Christina Savvas, Customer Editor.
“It was an ideal time to experiment with engagement on social and newsletters and also focus on our open rates and click-to-open rates,” she says. “We tracked where subscribers came from and also tried various tools to look at how adding value for our customers through competitions and discount codes drives more interest.”
These experiments provided a significant boost in audiences: in February 2022, there were 4,700 subscribers to the newsletter. By September of the same year, the figure had grown to 7,500 – an increase of almost 60%. Meanwhile, Brummie Mummies has become Reach’s top performing non-sport regional podcast.