Project summary

• Research and insights
• Brand positioning
• Brand development
• Campaign strategy
• Messaging development
• Channel planning
• Concept development
• Copywriting
• Audience testing
• Graphic design
• Website design and build
• Paid search
• Reporting and optimisation

Approach

We kicked off by holding focus groups with the Council’s existing foster carers to find out what motivated them. The group was exclusively female and over 35 years of age, and they all had birth children and were moved to give a child in care a home and a loving family. They collectively disliked the idea of fostering being a career.

We also carried out intensive desktop research of competitor organisations to understand their offering and marketing strategies to see what would set Dorset apart. The insight we drew from the research findings enabled us to develop a clear value proposition statement that focused on Dorset’s commitment to finding children loving and stable placements, close to home, where they can thrive.

We created a visual identity for the fostering service that used handwritten fonts and bright colours to make the daunting and emotionally complex subject of fostering accessible.

We developed a marketing strategy to promote the vision of a fostering service transforming the quality of its service for both carers and children. Our strategy sought to recruit and train new foster carers, find foster carers specifically for teenagers, and to recruit a more diverse community of foster carers to support children from different cultures.

For the foster carer recruitment campaign, we created the concept ‘fostering wins’ – which focused on how the small wins outweigh the bigger challenges in fostering. As our focus groups responded best to simple messaging and information that gave them a true insight into what to expect as a foster carer, our campaign content was in a friendly and helpful tone of voice that complimented the Council’s existing style.

The Council wanted to recruit at least 20 foster carers a year for the next two years. We forecast that our campaign would need to generate at least 400 enquiries over the next two years at a 10% conversion rate to meet this objective. To do this, we delivered a digital marketing campaign using Google Ads, social media, a dedicated microsite, and a campaign landing page with a downloadable information pack for applicants to find out more. We also created a campaign toolkit for the Council which provided dedicated assets for launching the new brand, including social media content and guidance on the strategy and messaging framework to run the campaign.