COVID-19 Response
Coronavirus has been the UK’s most challenging public health crisis for a generation. In these unprecedented times, it has never been more important for government to communicate effectively, working with a wide range of stakeholders and partners to reach a wide range of audiences from residents to businesses, from the general public to at risk groups.
As part of a cross-agency team, our role was to build a coalition of partners to reach our audiences effectively, efficiently and at speed to communicate the changing behaviours needed to control the pandemic and its consequences.
The circumstances are complex and our messaging has needed to be flexible to ensure we target audiences effectively. Some adhere to government guidance, some need to be reminded what the guidance is and others do not want to adhere to any government guidance. To tackle this, we had to select a range of organisations to use their trusted voices to deliver timely messages and actions to our audiences.
In twelve months, we secured support from 100 trusted organisations to support our campaign messaging in their own communication channels and help reach a cumulative 250 million. For example, we leveraged iconic free media to generate mass reach, from BT Tower hosting our messaging to stay home and app launch messaging on Royal Mail franked envelopes to reach 30 million households.
We utilised co-created broadcast content to make messaging relevant for under-represented audiences. On BT Sport there was a football themed Hands, Face, Space brand chant, whereas over on ITV2 they used an infamous Love Island clip to help viewers to understand how long they should wash their hands for, and Together TV developed ‘You are not alone’ campaign, using our assets to create on air content and quizzes.
To reach young men we also engaged the gaming sector and delivered an HMG first – in-game messaging in titles such as Call of Duty and Dirt Rally 2 delivering reach to hundreds of thousands of 18-35 year olds. We also reached this audience through securing support from RFU’s Twitter account with 1.1 million followers, and via Eddie Jones, delivering over 11k views.
