The focus of this campaign was to get people to think about the importance of "first breaks" - those moments when someone took a chance on them and helped them break into their chosen careers. The campaign ran for a week from 20th - 27th January 2014, maintained on our end by a small team of me and two other colleagues.
The plan was to get the target audience of employers to think about their own first break and make them realise the power they had to give young people today their first breaks.
The plan was to get the target audience of employers to think about their own first break and make them realise the power they had to give young people today their first breaks.
Headline stats
- Over 3 million impacts on Twitter and a reach of over 970,000
- 114 new Twitter followers
- 883 visits to the UKCES blog articles featuring this campaign over the course of the week
To get the campaign going we published and promoted a blog encouraging people to tweet a set of e-cards developed by our creative agency to the person (or company) who gave them their first big break. There were several to choose from to aid with interactivity. I had also shared our plans with a selection of our key Twitter followers encouraging them to participate in this and thus increase the initial impact of the campaign.
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For the first Monday and Tuesday the team was divided into two groups: people who were actively tweeting questions like "Who gave you your first break" and people who were looking for responding to tweets already making use of the hashtag. Both groups aimed to bring as many people into the conversation as possible. On Wednesday we shifted the focus to look at the difficulties young people today face when starting out in the world of work. The Office for National Statistics had just released its monthly youth unemployment statistics, which showed that there were 920,000 young people between 16 and 25 out of work in the UK. We used this as a hook for the day's tweeting.
As well as simple tweets stating this number was far too high, we had prepared a variety of rich content to drive the message home and provide concrete ways employers could help lower this number. We had a series of designed quotes from UKCES commissioners - influential UK business people. We had a video succinctly showing some of the business benefits of hiring young people. Finally, we had an interactive PDF document which highlighted ten ways in which employers could make a difference.Thanks to the initial crowdsourcing conducted over the two previous days, this content had a far greater than average reach.
As well as simple tweets stating this number was far too high, we had prepared a variety of rich content to drive the message home and provide concrete ways employers could help lower this number. We had a series of designed quotes from UKCES commissioners - influential UK business people. We had a video succinctly showing some of the business benefits of hiring young people. Finally, we had an interactive PDF document which highlighted ten ways in which employers could make a difference.Thanks to the initial crowdsourcing conducted over the two previous days, this content had a far greater than average reach.
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Looking for other ways to approach the topic in an interesting and engaging manner over the following few days, I came up with the idea of a BuzzFeed article comparing being young and unemployed with the television series Game of Thrones, whose fourth series was coming up for release. The article, entitled "Why being young and unemployed is a Game of Thrones" received over 100 visits on the day of its publication, with a majority coming from Facebook - a network on which we normally did not have a great deal of influence.
A storify published on the 27th brought all the content together, and summarised the action of the campaign. In this way we were able to re-engage the audience and encourage them to explore content they may have missed first time around.
A storify published on the 27th brought all the content together, and summarised the action of the campaign. In this way we were able to re-engage the audience and encourage them to explore content they may have missed first time around.
