National Schools Growing Competition introduces Baby Bio to younger audience

28 April 2004

National Schools Growing Competition, designed to help children learn and have fun with plants, has been running for a number of years with the support of a range of sponsors from the horticultural world in conjunction with the Garden Centre Association.

But 2004 has seen the high profile competition get lots of new shoots, thanks to sole sponsorship by pbi Home & Garden, which fully supported the event under its Baby Bio brand.

And Quiet Storm Solutions played a major role in enabling pbi to make effective changes to the way the competition is organised, operated and marketed.

Among the innovations was a website where schools could register to take part. Quiet Storm included an interactive area in the site where classes could have fun online throughout the competition by posting photographs of their plants and messages and keeping an eye on how other schools’ plants were growing.

And as the headteacher in one participating school said, the introduction of the website meant that pupils were learning skills in addition to those relating to growing, including use of information technology.

While the website was an important part of the competition in 2004, it represented just one aspect of the work that Quiet Storm did for it. A total of 1297 classes took part in the competition and each one of them was been provided with a growing guidelines sheet designed by Quiet Storm.

Ahead of the schools becoming involved, garden centres had to be encouraged to support the competition in their areas and to help with this a full-colour four-page brochure was created.

The competition was a great success and pbi Home & Garden was delighted with the work done by Quiet Storm. Alison Hardy from the Bayer Group company said: Quiet storm handled everything for us and helped translate our ideas into reality. The website in particular has proved very popular.”

The National Schools Growing Competition was part of a wider initiative from Baby Bio to help children learn and have fun with growing. Since the competition Quiet Storm has added a new section to Baby Bio’s website, ‘Growing for Kids’, designed to enable all children to have access to the online activities and have some fun with growing.

Quiet Storm has designed and created animation for this site to make it lively and more interesting.

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