Built By Independents.

One Yorkshire Audience.

How It Works

Yorkshire Independents is designed around a simple idea:

Bring brilliant independent Yorkshire businesses together — and build an audience around them that none of us would be likely to build alone.

Founder Merchants get their own presence inside Yorkshire Independents.

They can introduce their business, showcase what they produce, direct customers to their existing online shop and build their own following.

At the same time, we work to grow a much larger Yorkshire-wide consumer audience around all of our participating independents.

Your audience.

Other merchants' audiences.

The audience Yorkshire Independents brings in.

Together, they create something much bigger.

We don't expect people to simply discover Pride of Yorkshire by accident.

We intend to actively give Yorkshire consumers reasons to join us.

Through Christmas 2026 and throughout 2027, Pride of Yorkshire will run major consumer-facing campaigns, promotions and collaborations with independent Yorkshire businesses.

These campaigns are designed to do two things:

Give consumers something worth joining for.

And:

Introduce those consumers to independent Yorkshire businesses they may never have discovered otherwise.

Some campaigns will be Yorkshire-wide.

Others may focus on particular interests, products, occasions or local areas.

The objective remains the same:

Build the audience. Keep engaging it. Help independents benefit from it.

The examples below are UpViral case studies and are shown to demonstrate what referral-based audience-building campaigns can achieve.

Tickets for Good

Tickets for Good is based in Sheffield. They use desirable donated event tickets as the attraction and use UpViral/referral marketing to grow their audience.

One 14-day campaign brought around 2,300 new leads plus nearly 900 Facebook-group members, and after repeating the approach across campaigns they had generated 13,330+ leads.

Tasha Mayberry — Multi-Brand Giveaway

Multiple businesses contributed prizes, participating brands promoted the giveaway to their own audiences, and the combined campaign generated 4,300 direct leads + 1,579 referred leads, nearly 10,000 landing-page visits, and a 20% sales lift.

Siddharth Pal

Siddharth partnered with other businesses that supplied prizes worth around $13,000. The participating businesses also shared the giveaway through their own audiences.

The result was 4,691 leads, of which 3,713 were referred — roughly 80%. UpViral specifically attributes the success partly to mutually beneficial collaboration: prize providers received exposure and traffic while the organiser built the audience.

Pride of Yorkshire will use UpViral as one of the tools behind our audience-building campaigns.

UpViral campaigns are designed to encourage people not only to enter or participate themselves, but also to share campaigns with friends, family and their own networks.

That creates the potential for campaigns to spread well beyond the original audience.

Pride of Yorkshire isn't intended to be a business sitting on the sidelines trying to build an audience for everyone else.

The real opportunity comes when independent businesses help build it together.

Imagine:

One merchant shares a Pride of Yorkshire campaign with its customers.

Then another does the same.

Then another.

And another.

Each merchant introduces Pride of Yorkshire to people who already have an interest in supporting independent businesses.

Those people can then discover businesses from across the county.

Every participating merchant can help open the door to another group of Yorkshire consumers.

And because the resulting audience isn't built around one individual business, each merchant has the opportunity to be discovered by people brought into the platform by somebody else.

WHY FOUNDER MERCHANT PARTICIPATION MATTERS

Pride of Yorkshire

UpViral is only part of the plan.

Imagine 50 participating Yorkshire businesses each telling their own customers and social followers:

“We're part of Pride of Yorkshire — enter to Win Yorkshire!”

Now imagine 100.

Or 500.

Every participating merchant has their own customers, email subscribers and social followers.

Instead of those audiences remaining isolated, Pride of Yorkshire gives us an opportunity to bring them together around a shared campaign.

EVERY MERCHANT ADDS TO THE AUDIENCE.

EVERY NEW ENTRANT ADDS TO THE AUDIENCE.

EVERY CAMPAIGN BUILDS ON THE LAST.

That's the bigger idea behind Pride of Yorkshire.

The giveaways attract attention.

But they're not the end goal.

The goal is to create an audience of Yorkshire consumers interested in:

Independent businesses

Yorkshire products

Local discoveries

Special offers

New merchants

Seasonal campaigns

and supporting businesses closer to home.

Over time, Pride of Yorkshire should become increasingly useful to merchants because the audience already exists.

We don't want Pride of Yorkshire to become another page containing dozens of logos that nobody visits.

We want people to:

Discover a merchant.

Read their story.

Explore their products.

Ask their Buddy a question.

Visit their online store.

Scan their QR code.

Save their BuddyCard.

Follow them.

Buy from them.

and hopefully…

KEEP BUYING FROM THEM.

Getting a new customer is valuable.

Getting that customer to come back again and again can be even more valuable.

Every Pride of Yorkshire Member receives their own Customer VIP Club App.

Customers can join using your QR code or personal link and add your branded App to their phone.

Then, once a week, you can send your VIP Members a PUSH notification.

Use it for:

• New products

• Special offers

• New menus

• Events

• Seasonal ranges

• Quiet-day offers

• New stock

• Last-minute availability

• Gift ideas

• Important announcements

One useful message every week — directly to people who have chosen to follow your business.

And unlike SMS (Text), there is no per-message charge to the merchant for each included PUSH notification.

When your customers join your VIP Club, they remain connected to your business through your branded App and your weekly PUSH notifications.

But they may also discover other independent businesses through Pride of Yorkshire.

And the same works in your favour.

Customers introduced by other Members can discover your business too.

That is the exchange at the heart of Pride of Yorkshire:

You contribute access to your audience.
Other Members contribute access to theirs.
Together, everyone gains exposure to a much larger audience.

No independent business could economically build that Yorkshire-wide audience alone.

You may share some attention. But you gain access to far more of it.

Join Pride of Yorkshire, appear within the App and benefit from the digital tools.

JOIN AS A MEMBER MERCHANT →

Can you provide your December prize to a winner anywhere in Yorkshire?”

If the answer is yes…

and you're proud of what your independent business creates or sells…

WE'D LOVE TO HAVE YOU INVOLVED.

PRIDE OF YORKSHIRE

DISCOVER YORKSHIRE. SHOP INDEPENDENT. BUY YORKSHIRE.