Company: Bite The Ballot
Role: Creative and strategic lead
Brief / Mission: To create the world’s first voter advice app [VAA] targeted at young people
Duration: 8 months
Society in general doesn’t have enough accessible information when it comes to politics, young people aged 18-24 and younger seem even more neglected. Many young people don't even know who the political parties are never mind who their leaders or colours are, what left and right wing stands for. In fact, when do they get taught about politics? Rarely at school or at home, and when they do it has huge bias from the person who is informing them.
As part of the 12 month election strategy we would be trying to educate the UK’s youth on the political parties. Hopefully enabling them to feel more confident ahead of GE2015 and encouraging them to vote and know why they are doing so.
After a meeting with the super talented duo of Louis Reynolds and Jonathan Birdwell from the think tank Demos, in which they informed me of voter advice applications I began to search for one in any country that was targeted at young people. I didn't find one, so I hunted down two of my creative partners in crime, Tom Burton and Dom Baker and began to question how viable it would be to build one.
We could do it was the answer, that was all I needed to know, so we set out to create the world's first VAA targeted at young people, accessible, simple, fast and visually engaging were key components to making this work.
I lead a team of in-house people, specialist consultants, digital agency CTI and Twitter to devise the overall project timelines, deliverables, branding, produced and wrote most of the content utilised in the marketing. My role was incredibly intense and I was leading on this across many months, coinciding with Leaders Live, NVRD and my general day-to-day job as chief creative officer.
Myself, Steve Cole and Oliver Sidorcick lead the social team, who were filled with super great creators ranging from Lewis Parker, Lucy Evenden, Jazza John and Darcy Cole. To create content asset banks and content schedule to engage people on social channels and drive users of Verto.
As usual with our campaigns at the small but mighty BTB we had no excess budget for marketing purposes, so the pressure was on and we had to work with what we had, our brains and contacts. I hosted creative sessions with the internal BTB team to identify partners, organisations and charities, unions and education establishments, creators and celebrities.
I managed our team on devising creative briefs for our partners with suggested posts, times and assets, perhaps our biggest coup was our partnership with the iPaper through top man Oly Duff who supported us throughout the course. Creating assets to drop in between relevant articles which drove hundreds of thousands of users to verto.
We worked with our creator activist network to encourage YouTube videos focusing on the upcoming election in various ways, from how to vote, spoiling ballots and explaining why they should vote. All videos linking through to Verto.
I worked on the creative and logistics for BTB’s collaboration with Starbucks for the DeCafe initiative - in which BTB and its grassroots team alongside key partners would host democracy cafes for young people. They would drink free coffee, use Verto and discuss politics.
I wrote and produced a series of videos to explain how the app works to save ourselves doing the same, so instead of rambling on about why we did each thing, i’ll let the content do that for me.
Verto was a success without a doubt, I had no marketing budget to play with as the development of the site cost more than we had imagined, even still very low, myself and the team worked our partners, activist and digital channels brilliantly. over 440,000 people played it in just over a month and 65% of those were within our target demographic. Still makes me feel warm and fuzzy we possibly helped so many people, no matter the age!