Insight
Inward migration contributes to making Scotland an inclusive, fair, prosperous and innovative country, yet it is a highly contentious subject.
In summer 2018, against a backdrop of Brexit, the Scottish Government commissioned us to launch a six-week digital and social media campaign, centred on an emotive film ‘We are Scotland’, showcasing the valuable role of migration.
Our target audience was the anxious middle: 18-54 year olds born and living in Scotland, worried about migration, not convinced by the economic arguments, but open to rational debate.
Insight showed they were unlikely to be motivated by facts and figures and might be resistant to ‘government’ messaging.
Idea
Instead of myth-busting, we needed an emotional approach to humanise the migration debate.
Designed to integrate with paid for media, our PR strategy:
- focused on promoting real life stories
- positioned migrants as colleagues, friends, family, neighbours who contribute to Scottish life
- used third party commentators including churches, football clubs, trade unions to maximise reach
Key to the success of the campaign was supporting stakeholders to promote stories themselves rather than through the Government to increase credibility. We organised a stakeholder event and created a toolkit to secure their buy-in and to help launch the campaign online.
Simultaneously, we started an intensive burst of activity.
Impact
This was a pilot campaign and recognised that shifting attitudes takes a long time. It exceeded key SMART objectives, indicating a future sustained campaign could potentially start to achieve attitudinal change.
Against objectives it achieved:
- 31% awareness level (target 25%)
- 64% motivation level among campaign recognisers (target 45%)
- 1m+ film views (371k via organic social media) (target 400k)
- 19m+ OTS in media/social media (92% positive, 5% balanced, 3% negative) (target 10m)
- 17m+ #WeAreScotland impressions (7.7k shares/RTs) (target 0.5m)
- Successful engagement with 51 stakeholders (target 30)
Our stakeholder approach was particularly successful in maximising reach and longevity. Support we secured from Rangers FC post its own tweets and bespoke #WeAreRangers film reached over 500k alone.
Note: Leith Agency, The Gate and Republic of Media provided creative, digital support and media buying for the wider marketing campaigns
The campaign won Gold at the 2019 CIPR PRide Awards
