N.L. immigration minister defends English soccer club sponsorship

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It was a simple, novel marketing gimmick, one that Newfoundland and Labrador hoped would attract skilled workers from an English shipbuilding centre to feed its need for workers.

The province paid $171,000 to put its name and the www.homeawaits.ca website on the jersey of Barrow A.F.C., a fourth-tier soccer team in the United Kingdom that is currently sitting 12th (of 24) in the division.

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The deal was mocked by political opponents at home, but it piqued national and international interest. The BBC, Independent and New York Times all picked up on the story.

Five months later, Immigration Minister Sarah Stoodley stands by the province’s decision even though the numbers might not entirely back the play.

For a while, it seemed a stroke of genius. Stoodley in September said the provincial immigration information website was getting 50,000 views a day, and the clicks kept coming. Barrow had qualified to play one of the world’s premier teams, Chelsea F.C., a matchup that meant even more exposure given it was to be played in a larger soccer venue and garner a much larger television audience. Another 1,200 visitors went to the website the day after the match.

It sounded great except the numbers were embarrassingly off, the minister said last week.

The Canadian Press reported that the 50,000 site visits represented the total number of visitors to the province’s site between June 22 and Sept. 28. Although the site did get a bump of 1,200 users in the day after the Chelsea game, that still didn’t match the peak daily traffic figure of 9,303 more than a week before the game.

Stoodley said she was simply reporting the numbers that were given to her. The website is run by m5 Marketing Communications and she said it emailed inaccurate data to her.

“I was very frustrated to find out the way the numbers were presented to me were not accurate,” she said. “I promise I was more frustrated than anyone.”

Stoodley this week said her department now has a dashboard that tracks the data and that the site has had more than 21,000 active users since August.

“I think it was money very well spent. There’s a range of ways you can spend your marketing budget,” she said. “In the U.K., football reaches a lot of people from all types of areas and employment sectors. It was kind of a way to try to do things a little bit differently.”

Contending with a shrinking labour force, Newfoundland and Labrador also has the country’s oldest population. The province targeted England because that country tightened its immigration laws last year, making it harder for newcomers to obtain work visas and to bring their family to the U.K.

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Through immigration recruitment fairs last fall in Manchester, Milton Keynes, London and Westfield Stratford, the province said it is now communicating with about 900 people that have the education and experience in demand by employers in health care, finance, technology, education, early childhood education, construction and social work.

The department considered three League 2 teams before settling on Barrow. For what it’s worth, that’s one tier higher than Wrexham A.F.C. was when Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds bought a stake in that team in 2021.

On the surface, the host community, Barrow-in-Furness, doesn’t seem like an obvious choice to spend advertising money on, and Barrow’s average game attendance is only about 3,000. But Stoodley believes the U.K. town and her province share similarities that might entice people to make the move to Canada and stay.

Barrow-in-Furness, dubbed the “capital of blue-collar Britain,” is one of the largest shipbuilding centres in the U.K. The two areas also share a similar rugged geography and are relatively isolated.

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“When we think about retention, we think that someone coming here to Newfoundland and Labrador from the U.K. might feel more at home and might be more likely to stay,” Stoodley said.

Phil Otto, founder and executive adviser at ChangeMakers, a national marketing firm, called the province’s partnership a guerrilla campaign.

“It’s a tactic that’s often intended to create earned media. They can work. They often don’t make sense off the top,” he said.

In the end, Otto said, two crucial questions need to be answered: How many skilled workers from the U.K. used the website to inquire about working in the province, and how many workers has the province recruited?

Stoodley was not certain how many workers the province has recruited from the U.K. Her department could also not say how many people from the U.K. reached out to the province via the website.

“Maybe they’ll be able to recruit 900 skilled workers to the province,” Otto said. “But there’s a million different ways to spend $171,000 over two years, and this doesn’t come to mind as one of my top five strategies.”

• Email: arankin@postmedia.com

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