Objectives

Air pollution across the UK causes an estimated 40,000 early deaths and affects the daily life of thousands of people who have no choice but to breathe dirty air. Illegal and harmful levels of air pollution are found not only in London but in cities and towns across the country. Despite this fact, the issue had largely failed to catch public attention in pollution hotspots outside of London.

Working with a coalition of transport, health and environmental charities, Purpose created a campaign brand, content strategy, and social media campaign to increase public awareness of air pollution outside of London, particularly targeting parents in five key cities. Key to our success was a rigorous message testing process and the development of highly targeted creative content that was tailored to our audience, including over 50 pieces of original items that generated 500K+ engagements and a series of offline advertisements in 80+ locations across the country. The work undertaken by this project was done in conjunction with our key partners ClientEarth, the UK100, British Lung Foundation and the Healthy Air Campaign and distribution and producing partners Oxbow, Clean Air Now, Bootstrapped PR, RKM Communications and Exterion Media.

Strategy and Execution

Framing air pollution as a health issue, Help Britain Breathe sought to shift public perception of air quality among parents outside of London, increasing awareness and agency. It did so by working and supporting local partners to shift the narrative on air pollution out of the capital, filling a knowledge gap in these key cities through the distribution of localised creative content and digital storytelling. By highlighting the effects of air pollution on children we aimed to motivate parents - key stakeholders for local politicians - to take action both locally and nationally.

In order to achieve our objective, we first built a new data-driven and responsive campaign, called Help Britain Breathe, as a sub-campaign of the existing Healthy Air Campaign coalition. The campaign focused on learning and adapting in real time, testing messaging on social media and using the results to further inform content and narrative development among our target audience. After building a sub-brand for the campaign, we launched a campaign microsite and devised an email program that garnered engagement rates at twice the industry average. On social media, we generated 50 pieces of digital content items, including 16 videos and 34 social graphics, all of which generated 579,006 engagements on Facebook as well as 5,136,431 impressions and 652,658 video views across Twitter, Youtube and Facebook.

We launched two outdoor advertising campaigns. The first included five different billboard designs in nine locations across our target cities, and the second included three different train advertisement designs in 77 train stations across four of the country's most air polluted regions: Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester. The billboard campaign was shortlisted for the National Air Quality Awards and testing around the train stations campaign showed an average 5.4% increase of awareness of air pollution as a health risk following interacting with the campaign content.

Drawing on previous work with the Healthy Air Campaign, we built two consultation tools that enabled people to participate with greater ease in the UK's Air Quality Consultation and the Diesel Scrappage Scheme Consultation. For the national consultation we generated fifteen times the responses recorded during the previous consultation and were greatly supported by the distribution of Healthy Air Campaign partners.

Additionally, we partnered with the organisation Clean Air Now in order to launch a campaign raising awareness on the impacts of air pollution on the skin, testing a hypothesis that parents in our target cities could be driven to action on air pollution through messages carried in the beauty and lifestyle press. Finally, we produced an animated video, "The Sparrow and the Very Smoggy City," which targeted online parents and children and was accompanied by eight lesson plans approved by the National Education Union (NEU) and disseminated to their teacher members and at NEU gatherings.

Results

Media