Win a £4,500 Promotional Video from EIGA Stories
In 2025, we will mark two key milestones in Vicinity's history: we will celebrate our tenth anniversary working with Business Improvement Districts, and we will launch our next-generation software platform that incorporates everything we've learned across the decade.
This is a great time for reflection—to remind ourselves of how we got here and to celebrate all the people who've been a part of our journey. This is the first in a short series of posts that will do just that.
Today, I'm rewinding back to 2012. Neither Vicinity nor the businesses it was born from (Solomon and LoyalFree) existed. At that time, a number of us were part of a media startup based in Leeds, UK. We were a group of young(ish) people who had become disillusioned with "regional media", which was, we felt, tailored to a different generation. Hungry for quality stories about the many positive aspects of our city, we set about building something of our own. What started as a Facebook Page took on a life of its own. Very soon, we were printing our own newspaper and publishing stories online and via an app. This "hyperlocal" project attracted national interest and support from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), Cabinet Office, and Innovate UK. With their support, we developed a self-service dashboard, using openly available data to help citizens understand more about what happened in the places where they lived, worked and played.
It was through this that we met Andrew Cooper at LeedsBID. He wanted a version of that dashboard that businesses could access. That evolved into developing a CRM for BIDs, and we found a new mission for our work. Inevitably, the media startup evolved into two distinct businesses: one concerned with helping place managers to capture their value and manage their data, and the other helping places to tell their stories.
The team behind the latter became EIGA stories, and has gone on to make award-winning documentaries for Amazon, Sky and ESPN, winning National Television Awards and international recognition as outstanding filmmakers.
Like Vicinity, place has remained central to their work, and their latest content studio, EIGA Stories, brings them back to our shared, hyperlocal roots. Simply put, EIGA Stories makes beautiful films about places.
They create romance, intrigue, excitement and provide inspiration for travellers, families, students and creatives. They achieve this by digging into the history and context of a place and finding the hidden gems that will grab their audience's attention.
As well as being award-winning filmmakers, their team includes experienced place and retail marketers, having worked extensively with Business Improvement Districts, local authorities, Mayors' offices, property owners/managers, and high street brands.
What sets EIGA apart is their audience appeal and the quality of their storytelling. ShangTing's video log, "Court & Shambles", offers an international audience her unique perspective on tourist destinations. Presenting in Mandarin, ShangTing's humorous and poetic style targets an audience of tourists coming to the UK from the Far East.
Meanwhile, "Adelane's Adventures" follows six-year-old Adelane (daughter of our very own CTO, Nathan) as she explores and describes her experience of family-friendly destinations. These are just two examples of the channels EIGA is developing to help places reach content consumers on platforms like YouTube.
Win a promotional video worth £4,500 for your place.
To celebrate the launch of EIGA, their team is offering Vicinity customers the chance to win a free promotional video worth £4,500. All you need to do to enter is follow this link: https://www.eigastories.com/bid-form.
In the meantime, if you want to know more about EIGA and how it can help you to develop content (whether you need place promotion or corporate content), download this document, which contains their contact details.
