Make a Stand - why the simplest campaign ideas are often the best

Less than a year ago I sat in a room with a colleague at the Chartered Institute of Housing to brainstorm a project to help to tackle domestic abuse.

Around an hour later we emerged with the outline of Make a Stand - a national campaign to encourage housing providers across the UK to take action to protect their residents and staff from one of our nation's biggest challenges.

Fast forward to today and I am immensely proud that in less than a year more than 300 housing organisations have now signed up to Make a Stand. Together they own 2.6 million homes - more than half of all social housing in the UK.

The campaign was born out the work of the then president of CIH, the inimitable Alison Inman, who made Women's Aid her presidential charity for the year.

When you have as strong an advocate as Alison; someone who can mobilise people and bring them together in a way I have rarely seen, to just raise money would be a waste.

This is how Make a Stand was born. In recognition that this was an opportunity to seize upon an issue which housing organisations needed to do much more to tackle. To use Alison's ever-honest, challenging and extremely powerful voice and work with people who were already doing fantastic but under-appreciated work in this area to make a real difference. Because that's what great campaigns have the power to do.

The fact Make a Stand has had such a massive impact is my proudest professional achievement.

So why has the campaign been such a big success?

I'll say right from the outset that it was nothing to do with budget. The entire project, from its conception, to the content, right through to the design, was delivered in-house.

The truth is there are a number of reasons why this campaign worked so well, including a lot of hard work, but here are some big ones:

1. It's simplicity - when it comes to campaigns, the simplest and clearest ideas are the best. We knew what we wanted to achieve from the outset and we didn't over stretch. We decided we wanted the campaign to encourage housing organisations to sign up to a pledge to make four commitments to tackle domestic abuse. The key was to find the careful balance between making those commitments significant enough that they would make a difference, but not so onerous that organisations were discouraged. You can come up with an amazing pledge, but not much point if no one signs up to it right?
2. We worked with partners - we recognised that we were not experts in domestic abuse and that others were. So we approached Women's Aid and the brilliant Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance (DAHA) to see if they would partner with us on the campaign and we were delighted when they said yes. We knew that their expertise and knowledge would help us to hone our pledges to make them as effective as possible and that the endorsement of these two organisations would increase the exposure and respectability of the campaign significantly.
3. We made it easy for people - if you want people to sign up for something you've got to make it as easy as you can. People are busy and housing organisations have enough priorities to worry about without making another commitment. That's why, working with Women's Aid and DAHA, we put together a simple pack that anyone could download to understand the commitments they would be making. We also set up a simple online form for them to sign the pledge, and then we sent anyone who signed up a pack guiding them through how to put each commitment into practice, a certificate so they could demonstrate they had signed up, a template press release for them to send out to publicise this and social media banners they could post immediately. That meant from day one we had people tweeting and talking about our campaign.
4. We put the campaign front and centre - someone once said to me, in reference to how one should approach marketing, 'spray it on their eyeballs'. As humorous an image as that is, there is a lot of wisdom in that phrase. It's true that when it comes to messages and campaigns, you cannot repeat something enough. So we made Make a Stand a part of everything we did from day one. We put it front and centre on our website, we gave everyone in the organisation an email signature, we made the campaign a focal point at Housing 2018 on our stand and in speeches. Whenever we could talk about it, we did. And our partners did the same - DAHA and Women's Aid have both been brilliant advocates for the campaign; helping to reach more organisations and support more people.

Make a Stand's success is a testament to that other crucial ingredient of a successful campaign - momentum. And now this campaign has momentum it is unstoppable. Because the question is no longer why would I join up to this campaign, it's why wouldn't I?

I learned an awful lot from working on Make a Stand and to watch it flourish now is a fantastic feeling.

If you work in housing and your organisation isn't signed up, please at least take a look. I really think that any housing organisation can make those four commitments happen. And in doing so, they could save a life.

For more information about Make a Stand click here.