Campaign supernova

I feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to spend a whole day with the superstars that are the campaigns team at Shelter.

If I had to sum up the day in a few words, I’d say: housing can learn a lot from Shelter’s campaign work.

In some ways that should come as no surprise, Shelter was founded almost 50 years ago as a campaigning organisation. Whilst they do more than that now, they are very proud to be, first and foremost, a charity campaigning for everyone to have a home. With a fair amount funding and resources at their disposal (all of which comes from donations), Shelter has run a staggering number of hugely successful campaigns. In fact, thanks to them, housing is currently polling as a top 5 voter issue; four years ago it was 17th.

And this is why I say we can learn a lot from them. There is an opportunity to borrow their tried and tested methods and apply them to our own work. This might be to campaign for a change in a local authority’s policy, or helping a community group to campaign for more support, or campaigning for tenants’ to change how they report a repair.

The most important lesson we learnt during the day was the importance of gathering insight about your target audience’s current behaviour and what would make them change to the behaviour you desire. You then shape your messages and campaign tactics around this insight.

For example, we were shown this award winning advert from Australia campaigning to stop people driving after a couple of drinks. The advert focuses on the harm drink drivers cause to others, rather than to themselves, as this is the message that their insight showed would have the most impact with the target audience.

Spending the day with Shelter has shown me the amazing things that campaigning can achieve and I’d really like to see comms teams and customer insight staff across the housing sector join forces to embrace and utilise campaigning as a key tool for achieving change.

As for my own Rising Stars campaign, I’ve taken on board everything I learnt at Shelter to produce a new and improved campaign plan (available on the CIH & Inside Housing websites) and I’m pleased to say I’m already putting some of the plan into action, check out my blog for updates on what I’m getting up to.