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Building a future for social housing with Shelter Scotland
  • Partner: Shelter Scotland
  • Cause: Build Scotland’s Future

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Shelter Scotland exists to defend the right to a safe, secure and affordable home for everyone. They provide practical support and advice to people experiencing bad housing or homelessness, by informing professionals and campaigning for legislative change.

Shelter’s latest mission? Pushing the Scottish government to increase the rate at which they are building social housing. That’s where we come in. Shelter challenged us to secure this commitment at a time when governments were struggling with the impact of COVID and economic recession.

4.5 Million
impressions across social media
1.1 million TV ad views
(that's 20% of the entire Scottish population)
19,208
petition signatures

The challenge

We were tasked with putting social housing firmly on the Scottish political agenda, lobbying each political party to commit to building 37,100 homes over 5 years. This target would ensure supply could keep up with the demand for safe, secure and affordable social housing. This was quite an ask, given the looming financial instability created by Brexit and COVID, and a climate of overstretched public services and diminished funds.

The solution

We built public support with an emotive broadcast advert supported by a digital campaign, putting real faces to the issue. The campaign successfully mobilised the public to apply pressure to SMPs pre-election. Resulting in every political party announcing their commitment to social housing in their party manifestos, firmly securing the future of social housing in Scotland’s political landscape.

 

Our tools to create solutions:

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Campaign success! Scottish government commits to 70,000 homes over 10 years.

The success of this campaign relied on emotively engaging the Scottish population. To build a narrative that really resonated, we tested a number of themes via social media before developing and designing the campaign based on this data. The results told us that our approach needed to delicately balance the public’s need for a hopeful outlook against the urgent need of the housing crisis.

Emote to educate
  • Emote to educate
    The broadcast advert, released digitally as well as on prime-time TV, led the emotive charge. This was followed with a targeted digital strategy which educated audiences with real human stories and hard hitting stats.

Slide left to see more

The broadcast advert, released digitally as well as on prime-time TV, led the emotive charge. This was followed with a targeted digital strategy which educated audiences with real human stories and hard hitting stats.
Timing is everything - evolving our strategy with our audiences

We launched #BuildScotlandsFuture before Christmas, knowing that the audience’s mood was likely to shift in the New Year. We preempted this, creating content with adaptable endings & varying moods, so we had the option to pivot swiftly from a pre-Christmas positive campaign to a harder hitting tone in January and beyond.

Nailed it : Every political party included social housing provisions in their manifesto

Our multichannel strategy utilised a combination of traditional broadcast media, targeted digital ads and shopfront installations. Reaching 25% of Scotland’s entire population, and gaining huge support – with 20,000 petition signatures and over 2000 letters sent to SMPs.

We introduced the colourful building blocks into photos of the cities featured in the City Ratings report, showing how LGBT+ inclusivity brings about diversity and innovation in cities. We played with the idea of building blocks stacking upwards and outwards - a nod to how some cities in the City Ratings are sliding backward from the last report, some are moving forward, and some continue to grow.
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Want to start a project with us?
Although we were designing this campaign within a well known brand, Shelter were in the early stages of a brand refresh behind the scenes - so we used this as an opportunity to push the brand out of it's box and go that extra mile. The new brand elements Shape History successfully introduced for this campaign became widely adopted in Shelter Scotland's updated brand identity.

    • Slide left to see more

    Don't just take our word for it ...

    Hear from Shelter Scotland’s Gordon MacRae.

    Assistant Director for Communications & Advocacy, in his wrap up of the #BuildScotlandsFuture campaign

    "Social housing will be at the centre of that government's agenda in no small part because of an amazing campaign [...] the biggest that Shelter Scotland has ever run."
    Working towards SDG goal