social norms
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 »
First Prize goes to…!
…Ellesmere Park High School with their brilliant ‘Benjamin the anti-bullying buddy campaign’! Read the rest of this entry »
The decision is yours!
The short listed entries for the Enterprise Awards 2015 have been revealed and we now need you to decide on the winner!
We have compiled a short video to remind you of the fantastic campaigns from year 9 students across the UK.
Voting will be open for a fortnight and the winners announced shortly after that.
There is £1000 worth of prizes available to the top three campaigns, so your vote really does count!
‘Mirror mirror on the wall’ who will be our enterprise winner overall?
The next campaigns to reach the National Finals have now been decided on and come from schools in the Midlands and South East.
The first campaign comes from year 9 students at Dormston School in Dudley, who created their ‘Mirror Mirror…’ poster using a realistic wall design, mirror frame and real mirror inserts. They hope by students sharing selfies on Facebook, that they will spread the message that a huge 99% of them would take action against bullying in their school – a very original campaign idea!
The next finalists are Holly Hall Academy, also from Dudley, whose campaign was just too well thought out not to make the shortlist. Focussing on the fact that most of them never or rarely drink alcohol, they designed up water bottle labels using their catchy brand name ‘holly h2o’, which were placed onto bottles and sold in their school. They also created an original hashtag to integrate social media into their campaign. Read the rest of this entry »
Young People Wow Us Once Again!
The final week of term is upon us and what a fantastically successful year it has been for R U Different?
2014-15 has been the biggest year for us to date with many new schools across the UK and Denmark taking part in the programme.
After their introduction in the last academic year, our enterprise days have once again been a huge success in schools, proving young people are truly the experts in leading change!
One that particularly caught our eye came from year 9’s at Netherwood ALC in Barnsley (pictured).
![Netherwood_screen_saver_Perception[1]](https://thesocialnormsblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/netherwood_screen_saver_perception1.jpg)
