Building Manchester's local communities.

Manchester had pride and culture but no consistent digital home for it. The city talked about itself constantly, in pubs, at matches, on nights out, and almost none of that voice existed online in a form Mancunians recognised as their own.

The three builds each started from a different kind of zero. The Manc was a dormant brand that needed reviving. Mint Manchester was a community launched off the back of an audience that already existed. And Pokémon GO: Manchester was a bet on getting there first: building the city's community for a global game before the game had even launched. The pattern underneath all three was the same: build a genuine local community before anyone else did, and give it reasons to keep showing up after the novelty wears off.

We led with hyper-local, emotionally resonant content, memes, nostalgia and city pride, then turned audiences into communities with real-world meetups and constant, two-way engagement. The content earned the follow; the meetups and the moderation earned the belonging, and belonging is what makes a community outlast its founders.

The Manc came back to life as a powerhouse of Manchester's digital culture, passing 400K Facebook followers in our era. Mint Manchester grew into a leading local hub of 30K+ members off the back of it. And the Pokémon GO group was built before the game even launched, with a Piccadilly Gardens meet-up on day one of release in July 2016 that turned a waiting list into a community in an afternoon. That group is still active a decade on, run by the community it was built for.