BACKGROUND
In 2022, Drummond Central was appointed by Sunderland City Council to deliver a city-wide campaign that incited pride and a real sense of belonging across a very diverse group of residents.
Drummond Central have continued to work alongside Sunderland City Council to develop the campaign, creating new iterations in 2023 & 2024.
The council had big ambitions for Sunderland but residents didn’t share them as they didn’t have a clear vision or ambition for the future. We set out to bridge the gap between ambition and attainability and help to lead Sunderland into a more positive and ambitious future.
TARGET AUDIENCE
This was a campaign that needed to connect with all residents of Sunderland, which undoubtedly is a tough brief.
However, Drummond Central identified two core audience groups for phase 1 of the campaign, that were invested in and impacted by Sunderland’s future.
Our bullseye was: Young independents & families
and our secondary audience was post-family & under 18s.
Four content pillars were developed in our initial strategy insight work, established to help articulate pride in meaningful and relatable ways and to give proof points to the fact that things are already better than people realise.
Leisure & health
Opportunity, education & economic
Neighbourhoods and connections
Culture
Our content pillars were established to help articulate pride in meaningful and relatable ways, rather than civic pride as an opaque concept.
The pillars were designed to be extended with the campaign to allow for additional topics and themes. The weighting of the pillars was intended to be flexible, to help to reach the right audience at the right time.
For phase 2 & 3, we focused on the same audience groups but across new content pillars. Each story aligned to a content pillar and was designed to showcase every day people stepping up to make Sunderland a better place for the greater good. We hoped that this would inspire our wider audience to feel like they too could get involved in making the most of Sunderland.
CLIENT CHALLENGE
‘Civic pride’ is a difficult-to-define concept. There are many drivers of pride - some are based on lived experience and others based on perceptions influenced by media and community word of mouth / socials.
Despite the swathes of opportunities - economic, educational, cultural, community-building or health-related - Sunderland’s people were just not very aware of them.
The client challenge was routed in a perceived lack of investment and progress as a city. Residents felt a geographical disconnect and an unclear collective ambition and vision for the city.
AGENCY SOLUTION
To help inform our strategy, we conducted consultations across the Sunderland area. We conducted resident workshops, business interviews and stakeholder sessions alongside our desk research to create the strategic platform.
We found that Sunderland’s people are a deeply proud bunch while also feeling humble and slightly uneasy at proclaiming their local pride. Our audience didn’t want to hear a series of announcements from the council telling them why they should be more proud. Sunderland’s people themselves needed to be the messengers. We needed to show, not tell, the reasons to celebrate Sunderland and encourage everyone to play their part by getting involved.
Our strategic and creative platform became: We all make Sunderland.
The success of the campaign would lie in the stories we told about real people delivering reasons to be proud in Sunderland. Therefore, our creative platform showcased all of the people and services that Sunderland should be proud of, and created a series of case study-style ads with real people from Sunderland.
We agreed that a multi-channel advertising campaign was the best approach to reach our audiences. The campaign was launched across VOD, cinema, paid social, digital radio and DOOH. We also created a landing page for the campaign which housed longer form content on each case study and their impact on Sunderland.
Users were encouraged to pledge their name on a map of Sunderland to help encourage the message that we all make Sunderland.
THE RESULTS
Using the GCS evaluation framework we analysed media data, independent campaign evaluation survey and web data.
The data concluded that half of all residents recognised one or more of the campaign elements. Recognition was highest for young independents and families, our bullseye audiences.
CTR on digital exceeded the industry benchmark four-fold (4% vs 0.9%) and the campaign page bounce rate was 33 points better than the main site.
Prompted messaging out-takes were strongest around:
I could get more involved in things going on (70% take-out).
Sunderland is a good place to live (68%).
More things to do here than I thought (64%).
There are things happening here for people like me (62%).
There was strong correlation between campaign exposure and increased feelings of pride in Sunderland (69% agree vs 52% who hadn’t seen campaign) and recommending Sunderland as a place to live (73% vs 50%).
On all key drivers of civic pride, residents who had seen the campaign were more positive than those who hadn’t. Campaign recognisers agreed much more strongly that they felt informed about what there was to do in Sunderland (74% vs 54%).
62% of people who saw the campaign took at least one of the desired actions, most commonly spreading the ‘We All Make Sunderland’ message, by discussing it with someone else or visiting the campaign landing page.
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