An award-winning Staffordshire marketing agency is behind a powerful campaign aimed at tackling anti-social behaviour in and around county hotspots.
MacMartin, which has offices in Staffordshire and Derbyshire, was commissioned by The Staffordshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner to create the impactful campaign.
Collaborating with Staffordshire Police, a range of Staffordshire based council bodies and local businesses, MacMartin used their behaviour change expertise to create the effective ‘Every Action Counts’ campaign. Featuring posters, social media posts, online advertising and video, the wide-ranging campaign was designed to reach the masses.
The campaign has been aimed at discouraging anti-social behaviour (ASB) and educating people on its consequences, whilst also encouraging residents to report anti-social behaviour, and providing support for businesses.
MacMartin’s behaviour change team did this by a variety of means, including challenging people to consider whether their actions may disappoint loved ones, increasing confidence amongst residents and businesses, and giving people a sense of community pride.
Videos telling the stories of people who have turned their lives around, having been involved with poor decision-making in their youth, formed a particularly striking part of the campaign.
Siân Twigg, project and campaign manager at MacMartin, explained that sound behavioural science was behind the effective campaign, whose visuals include pictures of family members with the question: ‘Are you making your mum/grandad/partner/self proud?’ Results of the campaign have shown just this one element alone reached more than a million people.
She said: “We conducted research around the motivations of young people during the development of this campaign, which told us that most young people respond to not wanting to let down people they care about.
“Our research also strongly suggested that a ‘softly softly’ approach would not work with this age group. Because of this, we produced some powerful visuals aimed at getting young people to stop and think before they potentially let themselves, family members and communities down.
“A key element of the campaign was to let residents and local businesses know how to report anti-social behaviour. We wanted to reinforce the message that things are being done to tackle ASB in these areas. Every report helps build a picture of ASB hot spots, which leads to further intervention and preventions being put in place.”
MacMartin, which specialises in behaviour change marketing to incite positive societal change, produced materials in a range of formats including Snapchat videos and Facebook posts, designed to reach different audiences including families and young people.
Anna Hutton, MacMartin’s director of communications and behaviour change, said: “We are so proud to have been commissioned to create this campaign around a very important issue. Trying to change poor decisions before they happen is something that skilful marketing can achieve. Anti-social behaviour can affect everyone’s pride in their area, and we are aiming to help turn things around with our campaign.”
The ‘Every Action Counts’ website can be found here www.every-action-counts.co.uk and contains useful information on what ASB is, and how it can be reported. Examples of ASB include shouting, intimidating behaviour such as verbal abuse; dumping rubbish on public roads, land or rivers; violence; noise such as DIY at unsocial hours or frequent loud parties; vandalism and anti-social drinking.
The website features case studies along with information on how to report anti-social behaviour, plus details on where Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs) are in place in the area.
