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Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors

Title: RICS Business (2002 - 2010)
Target: 96,000 surveying property professionals
Key aim: Relaunch and modernise established brand
Pagination and frequency: 72 pages, B2B monthly
Format: Perfect bound A4 magazine

RICS's testimonial

In 2002 RICS awarded Atom the contract to publish its monthly magazine and a range of its professional journals as part of a realignment of its communication process.

Atom identified, as part of its analysis, the following key issues

Members of professional institutions and associations expect clear and valuable benefits for their fees, including service innovation, networking opportunities and business advice
Communication with members must be well controlled, professional, relevant and useful – striking a good balance between industry news and RICS member specific news
Magazines are a clear benefit of membership but can be expensive to produce
Internal resources often struggle to keep up with the demands of producing communications

Download a sample page (PDF) from this magazine

Atom relaunched the magazine into a very specialist sector with a demanding professional audience. We hired staff from the property sector and recruited ad sales from a specialist B2B publisher.

Atom quickly got up to speed with the core objectives by meeting with many levels of RICS, and seeing how the stated marketing objectives were reflected in the running of the business.

Atom went on to identify the key objectives for the re-launch:

Cost savings to RICS through smart planning and increased income from advertising
Release RICS internal management and staff time for other tasks
Improve the quality of editorial and design
Brand enhancement
Give greater control to RICS through reporting procedures
To raise awareness of RICS benefits, products and service initiatives
To help to build stronger relationships with its readers

In 2004, after judging the first two years of Atom’s work, RICS extended the publishing contract. In 2005 Atom won the contract to sell RICS’s first online recruitment website.

In March 2009 Atom launched a dedicated website for the magazine.

A radically re-shaped business plan saving more than £250,000 in the first year alone
A 47% increase in advertising revenue in the first two years of the contract
A secure and proactive business partnership with Atom
A totally re-designed and revitalised magazine
Outsourcing of all the major publishing functions but with greater control by RICS of the whole process

We conduct annual research via a rigorous survey of readers’ perceptions of and attitudes towards the magazine, as part of the APA/Millward Brown Advantage Study.

The results of the survey have been consistently encouraging. In 2008's readership survey, it was found that:

42% spend over 30 minutes with the magazine – 21% longer than the industry average
48% keep all or part of the magazine compared with the industry average of 18%
80% stated that RICS Business is the most used source of industry information, followed by the RICS Faculty and Regional publications.