Public awareness campaign – 2010 UK general election and English local elections
Aim
Our campaign aimed to maximise the number of eligible electors registered to vote and to reach key under-registered groups.
About our campaign
The campaign ran from 1-19 April and included advertising on TV, online, press and radio. We also ran a multi-media partnership with Bauer Media across their magazines, radio stations, TV music channels and websites, aimed at 17–24 year-old audience.
Click here for more information and to see some of our advertising work from this campaign
Campaign results
This campaign exceeded all expectations with record levels of response in all areas. In particular:
- 540,000 electoral registration forms were downloaded or posted out
- 2,300,000 visits to our aboutmyvote website
- 53,000 calls to our call centre
- 10,000 registration forms ordered from the call centre
- 13,800 visits to the register to vote page on Facebook (9–19 April)
- 2,000 people put a Twibbon on their profiles
How our results compare
We used the Central Office of Information’s (COI’s) Artemis evaluation tool to gain further insight into the campaign results and to determine who was responding to the campaign. Artemis pulls together information from the direct response, the media plan, the online survey on aboutmyvote and the profiling information collected by the call centre and compares them with a range of external data sources – geographic, socio-economic and ethnic – to provide detailed information on the performance of the campaign against other campaigns run through COI.
The results demonstrated that this particular campaign is the most effective campaign in Artemis in terms of value for money and response generated.
Other key successes of the campaign are as follows:
- the campaign indexed well against our under-registered audiences, particularly young people and lower socio-economic groups
- BME audiences are more likely to respond to the campaign than white audiences. Black African, Mixed and Chinese groups over index when compared with the UK population
- our online survey was completed by over 295,000 people and suggested that the largest age group that responded to the campaign was 18–24s (41%)
- consistent with other COI campaigns, younger people prefer to respond using the web, whereas older people prefer to respond via the phone
Public Relations activity
We also analysed the coverage of the campaign in the press and ahead of the campaign kicking off formally, we achieved:
- over 290 pieces of media coverage in March about the need to register ahead of the impending General Election (121 pieces of coverage in February)
- the aboutmyvote website address was mentioned in 309 pieces of media coverage in January to March
- most of our media coverage appeared in regional newspapers across the UK, but we also had coverage in consumer and trade publications and 17 stories in the national press
- between January and March 2010 our media coverage would have reached 61% of UK adults with each of them seeing an average of 39 stories about the Commission during this time
- we tweeted almost every day in the run up to the election, and had over 1,000 followers (see our Twitter page)
- according to our questionnaire on the aboutmyvote website, 25% of those responding said that they had found out about the site through media coverage
