When Aston Group wanted to showcase the amazing results of its whole-house retrofitting project, they called on Method Marketing to create an in-depth white paper.
When a building services company in Greater London successfully completed a project to reduce the carbon emissions of a pre-war home, they naturally wanted to celebrate their results and promote their work with a wider audience.
Having worked with the Method Marketing team to produce several case studies in the past, Aston Group got in touch with the team and requested a project white paper, exploring all of the measures implemented and the results achieved.
Here’s what happened…
Aston Group is a building services and facilities management company based in Romford, Essex. In 2020, it was asked by the London Borough of Waltham Forest to completely retrofit one of its Victorian terraced houses in Walthamstow as part of the Retrofit London programme.
The aim of the programme is to extensively retrofit the capital’s housing stock, leading to an average Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) Level of B by the year 2030. The London Borough of Waltham Forest is one of the leading councils on the project. As such, it invited Aston Group to extensively update a Walthamstow property to show how the energy-saving could be achieved.
Between January and July 2021, Aston Group made many improvements to the vacant property, including:
On completion of the project, the property had an 82% improvement in its energy use, an 81% reduction in its CO2 emissions and a 64% improvement in its running costs. Overall, the property’s EPC rating changed from E to the highest possible level, A.
A greatly reduced reliance on fossil fuels means carbon emissions for properties like this will be a fraction of their current levels, thanks to the work carried out by Aston Group.
Aston Group was justifiably proud of its part in such an important project and sought to produce a white paper that would showcase its achievements, encouraging other local authorities and landlords to implement similar measures. Having worked with Method Marketing for a year, producing case studies, the company naturally turned to our team to help.
With so many different disciplines involved and a tight timeframe for publication, our research and planning skills were put to the test.
We kicked off with a meeting to find out about all of the work they’d carried out in Waltham Forest, before mapping out the white paper structure to ensure that we would cover all aspects of the project. From there, page plans were then drawn up, setting out the format of each page and defining which Aston Group employees could be called upon to provide detailed information.
Once this stage was complete, we started work on the research phase, drilling down into the data on climate change and UK housing stock. This served to introduce the main body of the case study and establish the context – and urgency – of the project.
After this stage, we set up interviews with project stakeholders, which required us to familiarise ourselves with building practices, housing standards, terminology and regulations. By questioning the experts, we were able to understand the techniques used and their benefits, before distilling the information into a format that the general public would find accessible.
When the written drafts were signed off by the team, we were able to support Aston Group’s team with design, layout and proofreading, to ensure the white paper was professional, polished and high quality.
By working closely with the engineers and management at Aston Group, we developed a deep understanding of the retrofitting process and its wide-ranging benefits. This enabled us to create a white paper full of engaging content about climate change and the modern building practices and materials that are vital to reducing global carbon emissions.
Professionally designed using high-quality photography, the paper presented 34 pages of narrative, statistical and graphical information in an easy-to-read format.
Aston Group was pleased with the end product, and we were delighted to create a lasting record of a project they’re rightly very proud of.
Method Marketing helped us design and write a white paper, which was a first for us. The purpose was to help educate the general public about retrofitting their homes. They interviewed our engineers, gathering complex processes [and] translating [them] so members of the public could easily understand the processes themselves. We’ve had a great response to both our case studies and the white paper and will continue using Method Marketing going forward.
Julia Dunn, Aston Group
If you’d like us to help you create your own white paper, please get in touch! You can call us on 0330 0430736 or email hello@methodmarketing.org.
