Social Marketing
An exciting year ahead for Social Sense
Firstly, we hope you all had a good festive break and we wish everyone a Happy New Year!
It’s easy to feel gloomy in January now Christmas is over and it’s back to pre-sunrise alarm calls, but it is a great time to reflect on the past year and look ahead to future plans.
2016 was great for us; an office relocation, new website launch, award win and the team doubling in size are amongst some of our achievements.
This year is set to be an even busier one and we wanted to remind you about the fantastic programmes that we will be running across the UK: Read the rest of this entry »
A new chapter for Social Sense
To round off a busy summer, we are really pleased to say that our brand new website has gone live today!
With a much needed fresher look, the long-awaited new site will act as the main ‘hub’ for information on our main products and programmes, R U Different?, Mindful Me and CTZN with links to their individual sites.
R U Different? wins coveted award
Social Sense’s R U Different? programme won the 2016 Social Marketing Campaign of the Year Award at the UK Public Sector Communications Awards.
Held at the Emirates Stadium on Thursday, the awards brought together talented agencies, providers and government bodies to celebrate UK campaigns that have generated social impact and behaviour change in 2016.
On announcing the award, Ex-TV Presenter and host Andy Crane said:
“The judges described this entry as unique and significant. This is a category demanding significant behavioural change and Social Sense were clever in their use of social media. They also provided great evidence”.
Managing Director of Social Sense, Gary Lovatt (pictured central), said the team were delighted with the recognition.
“We know this programme is delivering life changing impacts. We see it in the data, the letters from young people and now had it verified from independent evaluations.
To have your industry peers recognise our work however is a very special moment and one that will spur us on to push on in our future growth.”
UK Public Sector Communications Awards 2016
The UK Public Sector Communications Awards have revealed their shortlist for this year and the Social Sense team are very proud to have made the finals with our R U Different? programme.
The prestigious awards “celebrate and reward excellent communication strategies and campaigns, teams and individuals in local and national government, emergency services and not-for-profit bodies from across the UK”.
R U Different? is up against seven other nominees in the Social Marketing Campaign of The Year category.
The ceremony takes place on 14 July at the Emirates Stadium in London and the whole team are very excited!
You can view the full shortlist here.
Could your young people benefit from our 2016/17 programme?
It’s that time of year for us when we are busy travelling up and down the country briefing local authorities and schools about our world leading social norms intervention programme, R U Different?
Social norms is still widely accepted as being a successful early intervention tool across many different areas, including of course, health and wellbeing, especially that of teenagers whom we know are very much influenced by their peers.
A recent report by NESTA, cites social norms as “strong influencers of behaviour” and this is exactly why we use this to work with the young people themselves to create exciting campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »
Can we use Social Norms to predict the future?
The eternal challenge when commissioning any mainstream preventative programme in health, crime or education is to measure the ‘what if’ in one, three, five or ten years’ time.
Sometimes the ‘what if’ is about defining how many smokers might have been reduced or the levels of abstention from alcohol resulting from correcting social norms.
Sometimes it is about the impacts that can be generated around protective behaviours, i.e. the improved confidence, resilience or self-esteem young people will benefit from by being involved in a particular programme.
As a socially driven, values based organisation, we are acutely aware of our responsibilities to evidence the impacts we are making with young people through our programmes.
This is primarily the reason we embarked on a 30-month Knowledge Based Partnership (KTP) with the University of Salford. Not only did we want to be independently challenged, we wanted to apply the lessons we have learned to pioneer new territories of research.
Read the rest of this entry »
