Sunrise Senior Living and Gracewell Healthcare were Five on a Bike’s first client within the care sector, and undoubtedly the client that made us fall in love with care. Over 6 years of working together, the Five on a Bike team has filmed in all 46 of their homes, capturing each one’s unique personality in video tours, case study videos, and reassurance pieces.

Five on a Bike began its relationship with Sunrise and Gracewell by creating emotive case studies to boost their marketing process. We wanted to capture the attention of potential residents and their families by telling the real-life stories of existing residents in Sunrise and Gracewell homes. Even now, we think that this type of video is one of the most powerful tools that a care home or care home group can use in their marketing.

Sunrise and Gracewell created the ‘Heart and Soul Awards’ to show their appreciation for their teams across the country. From 2016 onwards, Five on a Bike travelled to Sunrise and Gracewell homes to film nomination videos and highlights of key members of staff, showcasing their incredible achievements and impacts on the company. 

From personal stories, to overall outstanding performance, our focus with the heart and soul videos was to capture the genuine emotion of those giving and receiving the awards. It was important to highlight how important these awards were within Sunrise Senior Living and Gracewell Healthcare, as a sign of exemplary service and going above and beyond for their residents.

In 2018, it was time to film video tours in all 46 Sunrise and Gracewell homes, up and down the UK. Over the next 18 months, the Five on a Bike team created a series of beautiful tours, focussing on each home’s USP, capturing touching moments between team members and residents, and showing off the luxury facilities that they had to offer.

These tours were made to be the main focus of each home’s webpage. With this in mind, we set out to capture the absolute best features of each home, from innovative activities, to exciting day trips, to beautiful grounds and facilities. These videos were received extremely well and continue to be the highlight of each home’s individual webpage. 

In 2019, Sunrise Senior Living, Gracewell Healthcare, and Five on a Bike worked together to create a series of videos highlighting the incredible food in their homes. With three highlight videos each, showcasing the incredible starters, main courses, and desserts on offer, our aim was to get potential residents and their families’ taste buds tingling. 

At the time when Tasty and Buzzfeed food were the pinnacles of food education on social media, we wanted to create something just as engaging by using overhead angles and mouth-watering closeups.

In 2020, the covid-19 pandemic hit the world. Sunrise and Gracewell and the Five on a Bike team moved fast to produce reassurance videos to highlight the stringent measures that their care teams were taking to keep their residents safe. After the media shone quite a negative light on the care sector, we were eager to show what amazing work was really going on behind closed doors.

In the midst of the pandemic, Sunrise and Gracewell ran a viral marketing campaign to show off the positivity and joy that was going on within their homes, despite the difficult times everyone was experiencing in lockdown. Together, we wrote a poem to bring this positivity to life. We wanted to show how hard every carer was working to not only keep their residents safe, but to bring excitement and joy to their daily lives whilst the country remained in quarantine. 

Bringing together social media clips, tik tok dances, and previously filmed footage of residents and staff, this video was an emotive and engaging piece of content intended to inspire and encourage positivity in care. We received a great response from this video and the entire #CelebrateCareHomes campaign was a great success, receiving over 5,000 views on the company’s YouTube channel alone, and many more across their social media pages. This is a piece of content that we were particularly proud to be involved in.

With every new installment in the homes of Sunrise Senior Living and Gracewell Healthcare, from covid-safe meeting rooms to full refurbishments, Five on a Bike followed behind creating beautiful introduction videos and tour updates. 

The most valuable addition to these kinds of videos that we have learnt over time, has been the inclusion of interviews with residents who are experiencing these installments and refurbishments. Nothing adds reliability and honesty to a video quite like hearing a glowing review of those who are experiencing what’s been put in place.

Five on a Bike has worked with the HR teams at Sunrise Senior Living and Gracewell Healthcare for many years, creating engaging content for its team members, from messages from the CEO to policy updates, and videos to improve recruitment and employee turnover. 

We really started to get involved in recruitment at the start of the pandemic. Sunrise and Gracewell urgently needed to onboard new team members, and using existing footage that we had previously shot, we were able to create engaging recruitment videos to help this process. These videos performed so well that afterward, we began to enter the homes again to film recruitment-specific content, conducting interviews with teams in the homes.

It was a New Dawn New Day for Sunrise and Gracewell in the Spring of 2021, and Five on a Bike created a dynamic video to lead the campaign. Focussing on new beginnings, the reopening of the world, and overall positivity moving forward, we created this video with the goal to engage, inspire and encourage its viewers to feel confident in care and everything that Sunrise Senior Living and Gracewell Healthcare was doing to keep its residents safe and happy.

In 2021, the world began to open again and it was time to invite family and friends back into Sunrise and Gracewell homes to see their loved ones. With this, Five on a Bike changed its approach from filming ‘Covid reassurance videos’ to filming general reassurance videos. We wanted to highlight that the homes are just as wonderful as they have always been to live in, and we were able to begin showcasing the incredible activities and events that the residents get to experience, once again.

We’ve loved every moment of being Sunrise Senior Living and Gracewell Healthcare’s video production company. Working on such a variety of marketing campaigns, recruitment projects, and supporting the companies through the pandemic has been a real journey for us all. We’re so excited to see what the future holds and we have Sunrise and Gracewell to thank for our love of everything care!