I’ve done quite a bit with government. I’ve worked on a recruitment campaign for Child Protection, a bullying and harassment awareness campaign, a pilot programme for a new way to experience our state’s parks and a number of internal employee projects.
The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) needed to recruit over 450 Child Protection (CP) practitioners in seven months. Not only was this a high target, CP needed to ensure they were reaching and attracting the right type of candidate – not just new graduates, but experienced career practitioners with higher qualifications. Child protection agencies are generally perceived negatively by the public. We needed to create a strategy and campaign to reach the desired candidates with the right messages and start changing the perception of CP.
Our ‘Pledge’ campaign focused on the pride and commitment of CP practitioners. We created a series of digital, radio and press ads and produced a number of storytelling videos. We designed the website to work within the DHHS framework and created all the content. The results have been stunning. There was a 362% increase in applications. Traffic to the new CP website increased 23% (well above our 10% target). The videos we produced were viewed 3,500 a month. At the end of seven months, CP recruited 22% more practitioners than their initial target – with more applications coming every week.
Parks Victoria protects and maintains one sixth of our state’s land. Their position is that healthy parks mean healthy people so part of their role is to make parks more accessible to Victorians and tourists. They asked our team to help create a pilot program to test whether accommodation ‘pods’ with fixed-roofs would attract a broader audience including out-of-season visitors.
The plan we developed for the pilot covered everything from strategy and stakeholder engagement to naming and promotion. The pilot was an incredible success for Parks Victoria, with 89% of respondents supporting the CANOPY concept. The results have given the Parks Victoria planning team a strong business case to take the pilot to the next stage. CANOPY will be the brand for all roofed accommodation in Parks Victoria parks.
DHHS and WorkSafe Victoria briefed us to create a campaign for health services to use to draw attention to the issue of bullying and harassment. This campaign needed to be ‘self-contained’ so that each organisation could launch and run it at any time depending on their individual need. We put together a six-phase strategy that included raising awareness, defining the different behaviours, education and outlining what to do to help stop bullying and harassment. We then presented five concepts. The campaign that I’m showing here is not the one that got the final tick but it was the one I felt most strongly about.
This poster campaign launched a new TAC sub-brand – youth risktaking. The TAC logo was left off on purpose in order to limit any sense that the message came from the (nanny) state government.