I spent last weekend with a Scout Group in Brighton who had invited Henry Allingham, one of the UK's only 3 living survivors of the WW1, to become a Scout.

Normally we don't get involved in local stories but this was different...we thought it had enough interest to give it legs to make it a national story. Specifically the following points helped project it to a national level:

- The story was taking place at the time of year when WW1 veterans are in the news

- Henry had been profiled on the BBC TV a few days before so was already in the news

-Investing Henry would make him the oldest living Scout in Europe

- There was an automatic Arah... factor with a Scout giving an award to Henry 100 years after he first joined.

Henry had wanted to join the Scouts 100 years ago but was unable to do so because his mum could not afford the Uniform. The 6th Brighton Scout Group decided to invest him 100 years after he first went along to his local Scout group. I thought this would make an interesting story that would get national coverage. And I was right. We got the story covered in the Times, The Sun, BBC online and a slot on BBC Five live and some local BBC local radio as part of the paper reviews. The whole story only took a couple of hours to pull together and was really touching to be part of.

If you want to see how we turned a really local story into something that worked nationally check out these links:
www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1951008.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5181640.ece

Simon Carter, Assistant Director of Marketing and Communications at The Scout Association