Anatomy of a campaign: Coalition of Change

Crack the Crises is a coalition of 75 British charities, including Save the Children, Oxfam, Tearfund and Action Aid, representing 12 million supporters, all of whom share a common challenge: how to drive change in a world where awareness does not always mean action. 

Galvanising UK and international leaders to take action on key social issues and climate change needs sustained engagement and demand by the electorate and the general public. It needs consequences that hit power structures where it matters to them. 

Hosting both the G7 and COP26 in 2021, the eyes of the world were on the UK, making the negotiations the perfect time to make real impact. Impact agency 89up worked with Crack the Crisis to develop and execute a fully integrated campaign to leverage this attention in just six weeks - building a bespoke campaign website and MP engagement tool, engaging influencers and forming partnerships with Waterstones, the Reach media group and children's illustrators to launch the Wave of Hope across the UK.

For project lead Sarah-Jane Rumford, the challenge was one that was seeded firmly in the need for forward motion. ‘We needed the message to be optimistic — showing that change is possible, and we needed engagement to be far and wide and visible to politicians. An integrated approach - securing rapid support from well-loved faces, free support from Waterstones so we had a high street presence and media support to give us a national presence - was vital to garnering nationwide support and visibility.' 

She adds: ‘This was the kind of campaign 89up thrives on: integrated, ambitious, wide-ranging and fast! Our young team is intensely motivated by climate justice, and worked incredibly hard to get the tone and content right - a delicate task when you are supporting a coalition.'

Better, together

Crack the Crises needed an integrated campaign to get G7 leaders to ‘crack the crises' facing humanity: delivering Covid vaccines and healthcare for all; fighting poverty and injustice; and ending climate chaos and the degradation of the natural world.

The brief asked for a PR and digital campaign in the run up to the G7 centred on the ‘Wave of Hope', asking the public to put pressure on political leaders to deliver real action  for change by displaying pictures of waving hands in their windows. 

Working with beloved children's illustrators, Quentin Blake, Diane Ewen, Nick Sharratt, Jim Field and Lauren Child, who created unique illustrations showing characters such as Tracy Beaker and Clarice Bean raising their arms and joining the Wave of Hope, the team wanted to send a message — that these crises are a mainstream conversation and one that people want to see reflected by their leaders. 

Visibility challenge

The goal was to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved in the campaign and to create a national moment that was fun and engaging, while also sending a clear message to politicians of the need to engage and their responsibility to lead. 

It was imperative for political decision makers and MPs, particularly Conservatives, to physically see the campaign in multiple spaces: in email inboxes, online, in shop windows and in the windows of the homes in their constituency. 

The illustrations were used to create social assets that could be shared online and to create a four-page spread that appeared in the Daily Mirror and Daily Record as part of a media partnership with the Reach group. Waterstones made 170,000 copies of the drawings available in all of its 283 stores across the country in a free partnership — allowing the public to pick them up for free, decorate and place them in their windows. In total, half a million posters were distributed to families.

Digital nation

With Jonathan Shakhovskoy leading the agency's web and studio work, the digital strategy was equally robust. Posters featured a QR code which took people directly to a custom website that sat on the Crack the Crises domain for the duration of the campaign where users could join the Wave of Hope by entering their postcode, then send an email to their constituency MP. Nearly 25,000 people joined the Wave of Hope online in the two weeks the campaign landed in print, in store and online. 

89up also used social data to uncover influencers for the campaign, which included mapping out the largest accounts in the cities of 150 target constituencies to find nano-influencers who could amplify the local aspect — while video ads with tailored messaging were aimed at different groups, using audience segmentation based on the Britain Talks Climate toolkit produced by Climate Outreach.

Inflated egos

Maintaining momentum and retaining talkability at the event itself meant keeping the world's eyeballs on the message and the key players — and 89up worked with the coalition to amplify through PR a huge blimp of Boris and Biden in trunks, holding hands, joining the Wave of Hope. 

The blimp's first journey on the waters off Cornwall hit a media sweet spot and these inflatable icons became the arresting backdrop for many media interviews, appearing at different places in Cornwall during the G7. For many around the world, they were the summit's abiding image — "We were actually blown away by how much attention it got," says Rumford.

Overall the 89up team achieved more than 540 pieces of coverage with a reach of 82.5 million in 19 countries — including placing an open letter in the Daily Mirror signed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Annie Lennox and Greta Thunberg calling on world leaders to help crack the crises of climate, equality and the environment. 

"We came to the 89up team with a near-impossible task - to conceive of and execute a compelling creative activation, with supporting PR, for a coalition of over 70 charities leading up to the G7... all within a month,' says Save the Children's Randi Lawrence. ‘They leveraged their relationships to help us secure media and corporate partners, were patient with us as our targets constantly shifted and ultimately became an extension of our team. There is no way we could have engaged the audiences we did, or delivered the incredible media coverage without them.'

A long-term challenge

Although the campaign was specifically geared toward the UK's hosting of the G7 in Cornwall, it was a great example of how charities with common interests are increasingly coming together rather than acting in silos.

More and more of 89up's work involves coalitions coming together to address issues holistically rather than each focusing on individual issues. For climate change and social campaigns that demand urgent and scalable solutions, awareness is important but the key imperative is to inspire action.

For Rumford, the key is in creating a sense of urgency but also possibility. ‘It's easy to overwhelm people with doom - and it's important people understand the consequences of not acting. But you must give people a sense that something can be done, whether at governmental level, by corporations, or through community action.'

And as the success of the blimp shows, a little levity too goes a long way to engage people and the media and open up positive dialogue amid concern and fear, even when  — or perhaps because — the stakes are so high for all of us. 

www.89up.org