Bringing Brands together to end bullying in schools

Back in September, as part of their on-going commitment to building a society based on mutual respect, Nationwide Building Society launched their partnership with The Diana Award, the living legacy to Princess Diana’s belief that young people have the power to change the world for the better. A key focus for The Diana Award is their Anti-Bullying work with schools across the country and this is something Nationwide have committed to support for the next 3 years.

Our work with Nationwide and The Diana Award began with a brief to raise awareness of their virtual ‘Big Assembly’ amongst teachers of Primary School Teachers with a target of 200k children watching the star-studded video encouraging young people to work together to end bullying in schools.  Our campaign ran across LinkedIn, Twitter and Sprint Education and achieved above and beyond our target, with enough schools signing up to have close to 45% of all Primary School children in the UK watching – which equates to 2m+ children!

As well as supporting The Big Assembly, Nationwide have also committed to funding the training of 10k additional Anti-Bullying Ambassadors in schools.  These Anti-Bullying Ambassadors are school-children themselves, trained by specialists working at The Diana Award to develop a range of preventative measures to keep their peers safe, promoting respect and celebrating difference. Ultimately they make it their mission to tackle bullying and support their peers, and our brief from Nationwide was to raise awareness of this during Anti-Bullying Week (16th-20th November 2020).

Our task was to drive awareness, but we wanted to go beyond this. We pulled together a campaign that would raise awareness but also drive conversation amongst our core parents audience, on a topic that is relatable to so many adults and children alike across the UK.  Our hero activation negotiated and managed by our Wavemaker Content team, was a partnership with ITV’s Loose Women. We leveraged their naturally conversational tone and previous support of the ‘Be Kind’ campaign to highlight Nationwide’s support of the Diana Award and ending bullying. Working with Brenda Edwards and Andrea McLean, who are both parents themselves, we created x2 30” spots where they discussed their own experiences with bullying, and their support of the funding of 10k additional Anti-Bullying Ambassadors in schools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvrVp3JW0z8&feature=emb_logo

These spots ran across the full ITV Morning Schedule (Loose Women, This Morning, Lorraine and Good Morning Britain), and were further amplified across VOD and organic social to ensure scale of the message across peak TV throughout the entirety of Anti-Bullying Week.

In addition, to take the conversation from a broadcast environment into smaller peer circles, we used 13 influencers, all parents themselves, to share personal stories across Anti-Bullying Week about how bullying affected them at school. By sharing their own stories and encouraging their followers to share theirs (which they did in their droves) they highlighted the importance of the work Nationwide and The Diana Award are doing, and drove a deeper engagement with this work in the conversations had in the comments section and in some cases via DM.

We’re extremely proud of work we’ve done this year to support Nationwide Building Society and The Diana Award to help build a more respectful society and look forward to what Years 2 & 3 of this partnership will bring.