Campaign Showcase: 2017 Public Affairs Awards Social Media Campaign of the Year

Campaign: How a 12 Month Social Media Campaign Saved Our Early Years

The Situation

The Government introduced a new policy in September 2014 that meant nursery staff could only qualify as Level 3 Early Years Educators if they had GCSEs in both English and maths at grade C or above. The policy meant alternative qualifications in literacy and numeracy, such as Functional Skills, no longer counted. The changes meant nurseries were left chronically short-staffed –at a time when demand was rising.

PLMR was enlisted in March 2016 by awarding body CACHE to campaign for the policy to be scrapped. Our strategy was to:

• Energetically campaign across digital, social and traditional platforms to build momentum
• Build a coalition of support among parents, early years staff, nursery managers, sector leaders and opposition politicians
• Encourage them to lobby the Education Secretary and key Ministers directly

What PLMR did

PLMR used social media campaigning to build maximum awareness, creating a bedrock of support, enhanced by our public relations and lobbying activity.

We created a name and logo for the campaign – #SaveOurEarlyYears – and a bespoke website. Its aim was to explain a complex issue in simple, accessible terms, with a strong call to action. The social media and digital elements of the campaign were:

• A branded and highly active Twitter account, with regular daily monitoring and management, building audiences entirely organically
• A one-click system that sent tweets directly to the Education Secretary from the website, allowing supporters to actively help the campaign
• A series of shareable and digestible infographics that helped make the issue easily understood by potential supporters
• A series of short, highly shareable video clips, utilising Twitter’s video auto-play feature, showing campaign support from important voices in the early education sector
• A one-click system that sent a pre-written email letter directly to the Education Secretary, urging her to reverse the decision, which was shared regularly on Twitter

The results

700,000+    

Impressions on social media – a testament to the number of users our campaign reached online

50,000+      

Early Years locations represented by the coalition of supporters our campaign put together, amassed predominantly through our Twitter interactions

1,000+ 

Tweets sent via our website’s one-click tweet buttons, sending an instant message to the DfE

6,000+

Likes, retweets and replies received on #SaveOurEarlyYears content by supporters across the UK. This included major players in the sector, ‘Supernanny’ Jo Frost, Shadow Education Ministers Nic Dakin, Stephen Twigg and Sharon Hodgson, Labour MP Julie Cooper and Lib Dem London Assembly Member Stephen Knight

2,000+

Digital campaign messages sent through our website to the Education Secretary, calling for the policy to be scrapped.

Outcome

In March 2017, after a year of our campaigning, and two-and-a-half years after the policy was introduced, Childcare Minister, Caroline Dinenage’s officials informed us that the GCSE-only policy would be scrapped and Functional Skills would be reinstated from 1st April.

As one nursery manager told us: “Without your drive we would still be in this boat. We are elated, one member of staff cried because it means so much to her. So, THANK YOU.”