Articles

Fun Kids launches 8 new stations

We’ve launched eight new Fun Kids branded radio stations which join our existing stations, Fun Kids and Fun Kids Junior.

If you love Fun Kids, we’ve got some super exciting news to share with you. 

Each one is available to listen to on the Fun Kids App, via the Fun Kids radio player as well as being available on the Amazon Kids+ service on Amazon Fire tablets!

You can even listen on Alexa, just activate the skill and then ask Alexa to play whichever Fun Kids radio station you want.

Plus, remember you can also keep listening to Fun Kids and Fun Kids Junior too!

Find out about all our new stations here…

There’s Fun Kids Silly, a whole radio station dedicated to just being silly. From songs about farts to farts that sound like songs, Fun Kids Silly is the place to be if you want to hear tunes like ‘Barbie’s Head Is Missing’, ‘Stink-o-saurus Song’ and ‘Baby Monkey’

After all that play, you might want to try Fun Kids Naps. Sometime you just want to put on some calming music to help get your child off to sleep without the drama. It’s a whole radio station of just the most relaxing bedtime lullabies to help your child get an early night.

You could try Fun Kids Classical. Did you know that classical music can help boost your child concentration, focus and help them to relax? That’s why we created Fun Kids Classical, a radio station that has nothing but the best classical musical for kids. It has music from all the best composers like Handel, Mozart and Bach.The orchestra is ready, so what are you waiting for?

For Dads who love the cheese, we’ve got a different kind of Classical too. Fun Kids Classics. The classics never die, and they also never stop playing on Fun Kids Classics! Whether you want to hear Avril Lavigne, Sia or even *NSYNC, it’s all hear on Fun Kids Classics. 

For those birthday parties, we’ve got Fun Kids Party. Sometimes kids just need that party atmosphere and everyone’s guaranteed to have a good time. With artists like Carly Rae Jepsen, Kidz Bop Kids and Panic! At The Disco, you’ll struggle to stop yourself from dancing!

Then there’s Fun Kids Pop Hits. We can all agree that pop is the best genre, right? They wouldn’t call it pop if it wasn’t! So if you want a non-stop playlist of nothing but the biggest and best pop hits for kids, then Fun Kids Pop Hits is the place for you! We’ve got all the biggest names in poop like Harry Styles, Little Mix and Ariana Grande. Day or night, a pop party is never far away with Fun Kids Pop Hits!

For lovers of Dan’s Animal Hour on Fun Kids, we’ve created Fun Kids Animals. It’s nothing but fun and hilarious songs all about animals, it’s like a zoo in your radio! So why not kick back, dust off your best impression of a duck and join in with the fun! We’ll be playing all the animal hits such as ‘Buzz Buzz Buzz’, ‘Walk Like an Elephant’ and ‘Bunny Hop’ all day long.

Then there’s Fun Kids Soundtracks. What turns a good film into a great film? Amazing music! That’s why we’ve taken this magical ingredient (the banging tunes) and made a whole radio station dedicated to all the best songs from the greatest films.So tune in to hear the biggest songs from tv shows and films you love like Frozen, Trolls and High School Musical!

Activity Quest goes daily lockdown

To support our listeners and families in the latest lockdown, we are producing Activity Quest Daily, our new, cross platform lockdown programme.

Consisting of five tasks for kids to complete each day – some fun, some educational – it’s available at funkidslive.com/daily – mentioned in each show across the day, and appears in our Activity Quest podcast channel.

Popstar of The Year 2020 – The Results Are In

Fun Kids listeners have spoken and Dua Lipa has been named their Popstar of the Year.

Here’s the full list of winners:

  1. Dua Lipa 
  2. Little Mix
  3. Taylor Swift 
  4. Anne-Marie 
  5. Ariana Grande 
  6. Ava Max 
  7. BTS 
  8. HRVY
  9. Katy Perry 
  10. George Ezra 
  11. Ed Sheeran 
  12. Kidz Bop
  13. Harry Styles 
  14. Panic! At The Disco
  15. One Direction 
  16. Bruno Mars 
  17. Lady Gaga 
  18. Tones And I 
  19. Justin Bieber
  20. Miley Cyrus

If you want to get involved in the next countdown get in touch sam@funkidslive.com

Seasons Greetings from Bex and Fun Kids

As 2020 draws to a close, Fun Kids wishes you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Looking to the New Year, we’re happy to help you reschedule any plans that changed in 2020 and excited to show you new opportunities for 2021.

At Fun Kids, we’ve already started to look ahead and have some very exciting new additions that offer even more ways to engage with children and families.

Get in touch with us 👇

We’re here until December 24th and between Christmas and New Year to discuss upcoming opportunities. If you fancy a chat about how we can help you talk to kids and their parents, get in touch.

Sam Howard – sam@funkidslive.com

Fun Kids Receive £50,000 From Government’s Culture Recovery Fund

Children’s Radio UK, owner of Fun Kids, has been awarded £50,000 as part of the Government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund. We’re one of 1,385 cultural and creative organisations across the country receiving the support.

Our MD, Gregory Watson, says “Fun Kids has provided an important service to children and parents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Broadcasting 24/7 we have helped keep families entertained and engaged.

“We have created new podcasts to help children learn at home, and to help families re-engage with their communities as restrictions were relaxed. This grant will help us continue to provide our important services, as well as create new content, including our very first ‘Pantoland’ pantomime in which Fun Kids presenters will have to battle evil ‘Baron Co-Vide’ who seeks to ruin pantomime and Christmas for children, seeking help from one or two famous faces along their route.

“Our 18-part pantomime launches 1st December and will be broadcast on air and available on the Santa Daily podcast.”

David Walliams Tops Kids Author Vote

David Walliams has been crowned the UK’s favourite children’s author by UK children and listeners to national children’s radio station Fun Kids.

The funnyman topped the Fun Kids Favourite Author vote, stealing the crown ahead of other popular authors including Roald Dahl, Julia Donaldson and J.K. Rowling.

Thousands of votes were cast in the poll and top 10 was revealed today, on World Book Day.

The Fun Kids Radio Favourite Author Top 10:

  1. David Walliams (World’s Worst Children author)
  2. Roald Dahl (who’s sold over 250m books)
  3. J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter author)
  4. Julia Donaldson (Writer of The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom)
  5. Jacqueline Wilson (Tracy Beaker and Hetty Feather writer)
  6. Michael Morpurgo (Previous children’s laureate and War Horse writer
  7. Enid Blyton (Famous Five and Noddy writer)
  8. Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid author)
  9. Matt Haig (A Boy Called Christmas writer)
  10. Tom Fletcher (McFly singer and Christmasaurus author)

Bex Lindsay, Fun Kids Radio home-time presenter and host of the Fun Kids Book Club podcast said: “We’ve always known how popular David Walliams was with our listeners but we were astounded by the number of votes he managed to pull in. Reading is such a huge part of our listeners’ lives, it’s great to see their passion for so many authors and their books.”

211 different authors received at least one vote in the competition which, as well as successful new children’s authors like Greg James and Laura Ellen Anderson, also included votes for Mr Men author Richard Hargreaves and even a vote for William Shakespeare!

Fun Kids Radio is available across the UK on DAB Digital Radio, online at funkidslive.com or by asking a smart speaker to “Play Fun Kids”.

The LEGO Ninjago Movie

Mission:
Our challenge was to raise awareness of the digital download and DVD release of The LEGO Ninjago Movie.

Campaign Objectives:

  • Raise awareness of The LEGO Ninjago Movie’s digital and DVD release
  • Reach children and parents who enjoy watching movies together
  • Reinforce the LEGO brand messaging and sense of fun.

Solution:

Launching on February 2nd Fun Kids put together a multi-platform campaign across radio, online and social media platforms. The campaign included a unique Hidden Ninja competition mechanic, these Ninjas allowed quick and easy access to a Fun Kids exclusive competition page once found.

Whilst providing a buzz and excitement around the digital download, DVD and Blu-Ray release, Fun Kids also ran bespoke online articles, providing extra promotion and drove direct links and key messaging.

Results:

  • 100,000 audience reach
  • 2,153 competition entries
  • 0.48% MPU CTR
Tagged with:

Topps: Match Attax

Mission:
Our challenge was to promote the new range of Match Attax and Slam Attax from Topps from July – October 2018.

Campaign Objectives:

  • Let the target audience of 6-11 year olds know about key releases
  • Promote
  • Convey the dark humour of the books
  • Drive sales of the book series

Solution:

Launching on the 22nd January 2018, Fun Kids put together a multi-platform campaign across radio, online and social platforms. This included a multi-platform competition and themed 60 second adverts.

Whilst providing a buzz and excitement around the new book covers, Fun Kids also ran bespoke online articles, providing extra promotion and drove direct links and key messaging. As well as promoting the new A Series of Unfortunate Events episodes coming to Netflix later in the year.

We also promoted the release to parents on Twitter Facebook and to our newsletter subscribers

 

Results:

  • 4 million on-air impacts
  • 8 opportunities to hear per listener
  • 1,700 competition entries
  • 2,500 newsletter opens

Fun Kids Launches New Skill for Amazon Echo

The first Alexa skills built specifically for kids are now live in the UK and the children’s radio station Fun Kids is a launch partner.

Amazon’s new Kid Skills give parents a layer of control over how their children use the popular Amazon Echo range of smart speakers, whitelisting and promoting approved apps.

Joining Fun Kids is content from The Beano, Duplo and Pac Man.

David Madelin, CTO at Fun Kids says “We want kids and families to be able to discover Fun Kids on all of their devices. We’re excited to have worked with Amazon to get this ready for the launch of Kid Skills and look forward to adding more features over the coming weeks.”

Fun Kids listeners can stream the radio station and ask Alexa questions about what’s currently playing on-air.

For any families who’ve enabled Kid Skills the request to “Play Fun Kids” will be delivered directly by the skill, rather than using a third party aggregator like TuneIn.

Dave continues “It’s important that we own the relationship with our listeners so we can deliver them a great product, but also to ensure we’re looking after children’s digital data, especially as new legislation comes into force this month.”

Fun Kids is the World’s Biggest Children’s Podcaster

UK children’s radio station Fun Kids is now the biggest producer of family podcasts in the world.

The station, which broadcasts nationwide in the UK on DAB Digital Radio, has been making podcasts since 2009, but they’re now responsible for 68 different podcast channels on a wide-range of topics to appeal to the interests of kids and families.

“Fun Kids has always been jam-packed with the most interesting content” says Station Manager Matt Deegan “we’re excited to make it over 2,000 episodes available to everyone, for free”.

In the UK kids are strong podcast listeners. According to RAJAR’s recent JamJar research, 18% of UK children (9 to 14s) listen to podcasts each week, on average for 41 minutes each.

The station produces regular podcast-specific shows including weekly kids magazine The Fun Kids Download presented by Sean Thorne and the Fun Kids Science Weekly presented by Dan Simpson with features about space, the human body and interviews with scientists from all over the world.

Today Fun Kids is announcing the Fun Kids Book Club – a new reading podcast. Its first episode kicks off with an interview with Kid Normal authors Greg James and Chris Smith, a reading from the new Future Ratboy book by author Jim Smith and presenter Bex Lindsay‘s top five books for the summer.

Alongside these podcasts, kids and parents can download Professor Hallux Builds a BodyDeep Space HighAge of the DinosaursMarina Ventura’s Guide to Our Planet and many more. There’s even a not-quite-Serial series called Bryony Brownwell’s Mystery Project. All of them are free and most are full-series so kids can binge-listen to their heart’s content.

The Fun Kids team has worked alongside many partners including the UK Space Agency, the National Gallery, the Bank of England, the Intellectual Property Office and the British Heart Foundation to produce some of these great shows.

As well as loads of audio podcasts, the station’s got a range of video podcasts too. Kids can keep up to date on the going’s on at Disney’s The Lodge and even watch cartoons to learn languages like Polish.

Matt Deegan: “Over a quarter of million children listen to Fun Kids on their radios, but we want to make all of our great shows available on parents’ phones, the family tablet and on the desktop too.”

All 68 podcast channels are available on funkidslive.com/podcasts, the Fun Kids appitunes.com/funkids and many of the world’s podcast aggregators.



Contact the team on 020 7739 7880 or email.