Angling Trust’s ‘Get Fishing’ videos highlight the accessibility of angling for all

This year, the Angling Trust’s ‘Get Fishing’ campaign to get more people fishing more often, embarked on a new video digital marketing strategy with 3 aims: 1 – to encourage the non-angling public to come to a Get Fishing event, 2 – to help Get Fishing event attendees progress to become fishing licence holders and, 3 – to inspire existing anglers to keep fishing. Jimmy Willis is running the activity and provides this update…

Get Fishing increasingly used Facebook and Instagram stories to keep up with current digital marketing developments and present beginner content in bite-size chunks on their timelines. This proved extremely popular and increased the campaign’s reach and follows to unprecedented levels.

The pure excitement captured in one Get Fishing video ‘Proud dad moment’ chimed with both anglers and non-anglers. With 930,000 views, 20,500 likes, 756 comments and 1,150 shares on Facebook it is the most successful Angling Trust video ever! This was also the year Get Fishing employed TikTok in its digital marketing mix. A TikTok of Harry age 4 catching a big carp went viral with 3,600,000 views that generated hundreds of questions about fishing.

To support Sport England’s ‘Uniting the Movement’ strategy, and in a bid to address, challenge and remove obstacles to diversity and inclusion in angling, Angling Trust expanded its ‘We Fish as One’ campaign. This raised interest from mainstream media and spread diversity and inclusion messages into the angling community via a campaign toolkit to provide partners such as clubs, coaches and fisheries the framework to adopt more inclusive ways of working.

We Fish as One campaign champion and Women’s Carp Team England member Aimee Eaton spoke out about fishing helping her to recover after experiencing domestic violence, and encouraged other victims to come forward and consider angling as a therapeutic hobby. It received widespread coverage in non-angling publications, notably Yahoo News and The Independent.

With the continued Environment Agency and Sport England investment the social media marketing strategy to encourage, help and inspire new anglers exceeded targets with the highest growth in follows, reach, engagements, and impressions across all of platforms in any year since these campaigns launched. New and more diverse audiences were exposed to the appeal of fishing and ultimately – despite the last two year’s challenges – these two highly effective Angling Trust marketing campaigns underpinned a correspondingly successful operational delivery programme that saw public attendance at Get Fishing events exceed all expectations in 2021/22.

Jimmy

Jimmy Willis – Marketing Manager (Participation), Angling Trust on [email protected]

The Get Fishing campaign to get more people fishing more often is funded by the Environment Agency from fishing licence income as part of the National Angling Strategic Services contract with the Angling Trust, and Sport England. Children under 13 do not need a licence, and licences for children aged between 13 and 16 are free but you still need to register and receive a licence in order to go fishing. You can get a licence for the full year, for 8 days (ideal for holidays!) or just a day’s fishing.

NOTE: Although young children who are under 13 year old do not need a licence to fish, the person supervising them needs the proper fishing licence to take hold of the rod or to help the child fish with it.

The Angling Trust’s ‘Get Fishing’ campaign is proudly supported by
Shakespeare, Exclusive Tackle Partner and Angling Direct, Exclusive Retail Partner
as we all work towards getting more people fishing, more often.

Sport England recognise the Angling Trust as the national governing body in England.
It funds the work we do to promote active lifestyles and to maintain a regular participation habit through the sport of angling
and in partnership with other organisations to deliver the National Angling Strategy.