How marketers can win heads and hearts on limited budgets
Every year around 100 students are lost to suicide at university. ForThe100, the movement launched in support of families affected, is calling for universities to be legally responsible for how students are treated and asking for Government to introduce a Statutory Duty of Care.
How marketers can win heads and hearts on limited budgets
Every year around 100 students are lost to suicide at university. ForThe100, the movement launched in support of families affected, is calling for universities to be legally responsible for how students are treated and asking for Government to introduce a Statutory Duty of Care.
Recently, boutique marketing agency TBD founded by law firm marketing expert Simon Marshall helped #ForThe100 campaigners, petitioning for a change in law on how students are treated and to prevent student suicide, reach and exceed their 100,000 e-petition signature goal.
In a collaborative effort, the team captured hearts and minds on a limited budget and tight timescale. Simon and Sophie (the PR lead at TBD), share how they did this and what in-house marketers might be able to apply to make their own campaigns a success.
The challenge
Every year around 100 students are lost to suicide at university. ForThe100, the movement launched in support of families affected, is calling for universities to be legally responsible for how students are treated and asking for Government to introduce a Statutory Duty of Care. With less than a month until the petition closed and around 75,000 signatures to go, we were asked to help get the campaign over the finish line.
When we started, we quickly ascertained that the campaign was coming to the end of what we called its ‘first phase’, comprising the technical legal element. It was clear to us that everyone who would sign the petition as a logical decision had already done so: all the people who were already aware of the high rates of suicide amongst students at university had by now supported it, and we had hit saturation point with this demographic.
In other words, the campaign had got as far as it could by appealing to people’s heads by highlighting the logical necessity for legal reform. Now the campaign had to find a way to touch people’s hearts instead – because where the heart goes, the votes will follow.
The how
We sought ways to emotionally appeal to a wider audience and to interest the press in covering, we knew by getting the press on side it would give us a platform to reach a wider audience. For this to work, we had to put the families and real stories at the heart of what we were doing and take the legal technical jargon out of it. By simplifying the campaign’s messages, we made it easier to “buy”.
At the same time, it had also become apparent to us that many of the parents and other family members of students lost to suicide hadn’t had the opportunity to share their story of their children, nor come together as a group to grieve. We knew if we could amplify their voices, we could reach more people and help them understand by evoking an emotional response. We felt that the bereaved needed to be heard, to have a collective experience, a cathartic and galvanising outpouring.
The light-bulb moment
To make the petition more newsworthy we quickly developed the idea of holding a candlelight vigil outside three different universities (London, Bristol and Edinburgh), where people had lost loved ones who were studying there.
The nature of the vigil provided striking symbolic imagery, and gave the parents an opportunity to come together and share their stories of loss. It also, importantly, gave the media a new story, and they suddenly became very interested.
The ‘magic formula’ for this media interest was amplified by the fact that across the country at three locations vigil’s were taking place, gaining press attention from both national and regional media.
Law firms tend to majorly underplay the power of imagery in their marketing and PR campaigns. You can use this to your advantage to stand out compared to others.
Engaging the media – a metamorphosis
By holding the vigil, the ForThe100 campaigners went from a position of trying to persuade the media to take an interest, to being able to talk to the public through radio and TV about the devastation they have suffered as the result of student suicide, and what needs to change in order to prevent other families from having to go through the same experience.
Parents spoke to the likes of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and other regional newspapers and radio stations. With reporters in some cases going to their houses before the vigil, and one parent even doing a long face-to-face interview from the Channel 4 studio.
However, despite the coverage of the vigil on national television, and signatures going up we still didn’t see the necessary rise in the numbers needed. With time ticking, it was hard not to lose a little faith.
We took a beat, stepped back from the campaign for an evening, rested. But by morning, we knew what we needed to do to really drive signatures: we needed to keep going down the personal route and tell the stories of their loved ones and what had happened to them at university highlighting what a change in law would have meant for them. And it had to come from the family members.
This was, of course, a very sensitive matter to broach. It took courage for us to suggest to the parents and relatives that they open up more to the public, in such an exposing way (and, of course, much greater courage for them to then act on our advice). But we were firmly convinced that this is what it would take in order to connect with a wider audience on that crucial emotional level.
We marketers need to be more willing to back our own expertise in this way when the situation demands. We felt sick asking, but knew in our hearts that it was the right thing to do. Maybe that sounds familiar to you as a professional services marketer?
“As we continue to adapt to the new ways of working - now is a good time to review your policies and reflect. It is important organisations do not lose out on the ground that they had made in implementing policies and changes within their organisation with regards to diversity and inclusion.”
“We knew if we could amplify their voices, we could reach more people and help them understand by evoking an emotional response. We felt that the bereaved needed to be heard, to have a collective experience, a cathartic and galvanising outpouring.”
Cultivating a collective voice
This twofold effect of telling more personal stories to an ever more interested media is ultimately what helped ForThe100 to evolve from a set of geographically separate campaigners into a coherent and cohesive group that spoke with a collective voice.
The result was a snow-ball effect: families who weren’t quite ready to tell their stories before saw how the media attention was boosting the number of signatures on the petition, and then felt more comfortable – and indeed compelled – to share their personal stories on social media.
Maxine Carrick – the mother of Oskar Carrick, a beautiful soul who took his own life in 2021 while studying at Sheffield Hallam University – in particular made a very great difference by telling her son’s story. Her work on Facebook ultimately brought in well over half of the additionally required signatures, and her post telling Oskar’s story gained over 20,000 reshares and millions upon millions of impressions.
There is a valuable lesson to be learned here by marketers: it’s essential to keep Facebook in your marketing arsenal, because personal stories that resonate with audiences will always prove effective on this channel. Don’t believe the naysayers who tell you that Facebook is a spent force. It’s often just being used the wrong way.
The same goes for Twitter. One million impressions alone came from a tweet by Hilary Grime, the mother of Phoebe, a Newcastle University student who died by suicide in 2021. It was even shared by celebrities such as Deborah Meaden, from Dragons’ Den and BBC radio presenter and DJ, Jo Whiley.
The campaign was also helped by the involvement of members of Gen Z. Jacob Nomafo, Summer Lytton Cobbold and Marc Siese who were able to tap into the younger generation. We learned from them and they learned from us. We firmly believe that our ‘coachability’ is one of the factors that helped the campaign get the petition over the line.
Success: KPIs and outcomes
Everything coalesced pretty much perfectly in the final days before the petition’s 19 March deadline. The additional media coverage we were able to generate ultimately enabled the families’ personal outpourings on social media, which in turn led to the e-petition being the most popular petition on the UK Government and Parliament Petitions website at the time, where it achieved well over the 100,000 required signatures.
During our work on this campaign, we witnessed a media and social-media snowball effect. In total the campaign achieved well in excess of 50 million media impressions during those three weeks . The photos of the vigil were viewed millions and millions of times. And on the night of the vigil, there were millions of viewers watching the news coverage, BBC news coverage alone gets 15.9m views a night and this was just one of the major news channels that covered the story.
And the coverage has not stopped there. Since the expiry of the petition deadline and the campaign’s remarkable success in this endeavour, ForThe100 has featured on BBC Breakfast and elsewhere on the BBC network, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky.
With recent coverage of the petition being handed over by family members and campaigners to Number 10 Downing street being filmed by Channel 5, ITV regional and national, BBC regional press, multiple radio stations and local news channels.
After handing over the petition on the 25th April, we accompanied representatives of ForThe100 to Westminster for a meeting with MPs of all political stripes to discuss the need for a statutory duty of care for students. By the end of this event, the mood in the room changed as it became apparent to the MPs present that it’s a matter of when, rather than if, the tireless campaigners succeed in their call for a change in legislation. We are extremely proud to have been – and continue to be – a part of it.
The lessons to be learned for other marketing campaigns
Although our work on the ForThe100 campaign was in no way commercial (we acted pro bono), we certainly feel there are many valuable lessons to be learned from this campaign for the daily work performed by marketers:
- This campaign demonstrated the power of a strong personal brand. The visual elements of the ForThe100 website, the imagery created by the vigil and the overall ForThe100 branding helped to ‘sell’ the message.
- We saw the importance of asking the following question: if the story isn’t selling in, what can you do to make it relevant for the media? Before our involvement, the campaigners' publicity efforts were entirely focused on the technical-legal issue of creating a statutory duty of care – but a change in the law could only ever be the end goal, and not the vehicle by which to arrive at it.
- It is not always about the turnout at an event, it’s the symbol of making it happen – the vigil didn’t get the high number of attendees that we had hoped for, but it was still the top story on ITV, Channel 4 and BBC Points West that night. The hugely symbolic imagery of the event, rather than any mass turnout, is what provided the much-needed hook to attract the media’s attention.
- Cultivating a collective voice and honing down on your key messages is essential – don’t get stuck in jargon, but instead make sure that what you have to say makes sense to the everyday person.
- We added the events to the media planners out there which the media uses to decide where to send its cameras. The more you can do this in advance of time, the greater the result will be.
- Most importantly of all: put the human at the front of your story. Calls to action are only effective when you emotionally engage with your audience. Personal stories that others can relate to are much more persuasive than any objective, rational appeal to logic.