When we were commissioned by the Children’s Charities Coalition, made up of Action for Children, Barnardo’s, NSPCC, National Children’s Bureau and The Children’s Society, to devise a pre-election integrated campaign that puts children at the heart of Government manifestos we jumped at the chance. It was clear from the outset that a campaign for children should not just be about children but centre them entirely.
The Principle team presented three conceptual ideas to the five children’s charities which amplified the theory of change work previously done with another agency. When coming up with a concept we always consider the following things:
This allows us to present our clients with ideas which meet their overall objective but also drive the message home to the right people. This approach equally enables us to understand the potential mitigation’s or current appetite for bolder ideas, also giving the client the opportunity to utilise ideas from other concepts when choosing their final one.
Following the presentation of these ideas, and exploration of others, there was a clear winner…#ChildrenAtTheTable.
Because we were so keen to involve children, we knew that the winning concept should also be tested by a group of willing young people who the coalition had already formed with the help of their fantastic participation teams. The next few weeks would involve us peeling back the layers on what “Children at the Table” means. This involved exploring how politicians should approach this concept, how children and young people bring their voice to the table, how parents would be involved, how the general public would advocate for children’s voice, how the hero video would be narrated and influenced by children, how the branding would bring children’s voice to life without mimicking or leading with one of the children’s charities coalition’s existing branding.
The principle team brainstormed all these questions and more and found the concept could withstand the test of time and work for both prongs of the campaign: policy and public affairs being one and the other a public facing campaign..
We created a live Terms of Reference that would set out how all the five charities and Principle would work together to achieve the given objective. To bring this to life we introduced weekly meetings with sub groups for key areas of media, campaigns, policy & public affairs across the five organisations, a smaller decision making group with all the key Heads of Departments across the charities and the formation of a operational meeting that would bring all those subgroups and decision makers together for key updates. We owe a shout out to FathomAi which enabled us to keep all minutes for these meetings actionable, shareable and succinct, a moment of silence for all the minutes!
It is fantastic to see all the coalition has continued to go on and do and we know that the individual charities policy recommendations are closer to being delivered because of the great hero level policy asks they were able to ask for, together, amidst a noisy and often crowded area of policy. Coalition work continues to be a key driver for change and the Children’s Charities Coalition have provided a masterclass in why working together in any sector is important to do. We at Principle are proud to have worked with them and been part of such a crucial journey.
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Want to build a campaign with the Principle team for your charity? Get in touch, we’d be delighted to support!
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