We played a key role in helping to exceed the Government’s target of 2.25 million adults improving their skills and gaining qualifications by 2010 – two years early
The challenge
Millions of adults in England struggle with basics English and maths and have difficulty with everyday tasks such as filling out forms, household budgeting and helping their children with their homework.
The issue suffers from a real stigma, with people reluctant to admit that they have a problem. This audience is typically unresponsive to traditional Government communications.
Our challenge is to continue to innovate with creative and engaging ways to reach this audience, raise awareness of the free Skills for Life courses available, and drive sign-ups.
Our response
Our strategy is to speak to our audience in familiar and timely ways. We do this by partnering with leading organisations from the worlds that resonate with them. Recent examples include darts, football, high-street shopping, supermarket shopping, holidays and cricket. This helps us to draw parallels with how brushing up our basic skills can benefit them in very tangible ways.
We also use influencers to tell our story for us as this helps us ensure friends, family and colleagues, who might persuade potential learners to consider brushing up on their skills, also overhear our messages.
We also look to use trusted famous faces and places to deliver potentially uncomfortable messaging – ensuring it hits home.
For each platform we pull the right organisations, people and importantly, messages, together to target the right channels including print media, blogs, fanzines, employee newsletters, broadcast, websites and You Tube to tell our story.
Results
In 2009 we:
- Achieved quarter on quarter media coverage growth, ensuring where possible the 0800 number and our campaign website appears in national, regional and digital media regularly
- Featured our Football Chants competition on a number of Premiership fanzines and website
- Taken Get On teams to eight Sainsbury’s stores resulting in over 200 genuine enquiries about Skills for Life course
- Partnered with and delivered messages to employees at the British Institute of Innkeeping, the English Cricket Board, Sainsbury’s, the British Darts Organisation and the Football League Trust
- Reached 48,473,541 million people with one campaign alone
