New members and campaigning success for National Education Union

Brief

In November 2022, Distract was entrusted by the NEU to create a campaign whose primary objective was to ignite a sense of urgency among the public, encouraging them to show support for a fully funded teacher pay rise. The NEU had to take action because teachers faced the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation. The government offered a pay rise of 5% to most teachers in September 2022; however, this was still not in line with the soaring level of inflation and meant that teachers would effectively be taking a real-term pay cut of 7% in 2022 alone. 

Requiring a record-breaking ballot turnout, we designed a far-reaching public information campaign inspiring individuals to write to their local Members of Parliament (MPs) and make their voices heard in Parliament. 

Approach

We initiated this campaign by conducting a series of Facebook campaigns that spanned several months and targeted a diverse audience, including NEU members and parents of school children. Through engaging graphics and graphic videos, we sought to build awareness around the pressing issue of teacher pay.

The main campaign, which focused on MP letters post-strike, was split into a series of geotargeted micro-campaigns after we theorised that people only care about what is happening within their local area. A unique graphic calling out an individual MP was then created for each of the 400+ locations, targeting their respective constituency and making it more emotive and relatable to the people living within each location.

The second part was an elaborate campaign targeting each of the 300 of the original 400+ constituencies, where the MP had actively written a letter. We devised a unique video and message, shown only to the parents and teachers in each constituency, declaring their local MP didn’t support education. After the videos generated a lot of attention, the campaign followed up with even more highly targeted ads. These ads featured each MP’s written response, shown to those who had interacted with the initial campaign. 

We live-streamed all press conferences and ballot results to create a real-time connection with the audience and foster transparency. The national marches were also broadcast, allowing individuals to participate virtually and magnify the campaign’s impact.

Results

Our ingenuity, unwavering dedication to the cause, and staying flexible with the client as the situation developed resulted in unprecedented success. The campaign galvanised the public, turning individual voices into a united force for change. The client saw huge uplifts in traffic and post engagements with each campaign.

On the 13th of December 2022, the team’s efforts helped the NEU to achieve a record-breaking 53% turnout, the biggest in teaching union history. A total of 921,903 people engaged with the campaign, but most importantly, it secured a 6.5% increase in teachers’ pay.