Looking beyond the label
For Refugee Week 2009, the British Red Cross wanted to foster empathy between the UK public and refugee community by emphasing the challenge refugees face in the UK particulary around the issue of identity.
The Red Cross asked everyone to look beyond the label of “refugee”, a label that’s so damaging and impersonal – and to see refugees for who they really are and what they contribute to the UK.
Not content with resting on our 2008 award-winning laurels in terms of creating ePR for the event, we’ve gone bigger and better this year. We’ve created a short film (in conjunction with the brilliant Agenda Collective) starring Mission Impossible 2 and Desperate Housewives, New Town Killers star Dougray Scott, highlighting the plight of refugees in the UK and surfacing some of their stories.
The idea
The real meat of the campaign we’ve created is an online movement to allow individuals to show support for the cause by participating in grass-roots action.
The idea couldn’t be simpler: asking people to change their online status from the 15th June (the start of Refugee Week), thus giving up a little of their own public identity in support of the refugees who often lose their public identity when they come to the UK.
To ‘look beyond the label’ by replacing their profile pictures and status, and spreading the action through tweeting about it, blogging about it and adding the call to action to their email signatures to encourage its viral spread.
Notable results
All this was achieved from a £6,000 investment, resulting in an AVE of over £xxx –a ROI of xxx% - helping dramatically raise the awareness of the Refugee Week campaign online.
- Over 70 articles online (inc. Telegraph, Indy, Yahoo! Metro, Campaign, Marketing)
- 15k views of the Dougray Scott video
- Constant stream of tweets, and RT from #charity, #refugeeweek
- 17k uniques to lookbeyondthelabel.com
- Massive referrals from google, Twitter, Facebook
- Bebo homepage, Yahoo! video homepage etc.
- Combined reach: 20m+ monthly unique users