Surfers Against Sewage: Plastic Free Schools – Re-engagement activations
Influential marine conservation group, Surfers Against Sewage, asked us to help them re-engage the members of their Plastic Free Schools network in the wake of the covid pandemic.
With over 300 million tons of plastic (almost the weight of the entire human population) produced worldwide each year, and half of it for single-use items, there’s never been a more urgent need for plastic education. Step in Plastic Free Schools (PFS), an educational programme ran by marine conservation charity, Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), that helps educators to teach pupils about plastic pollution and consumption in the UK.
Despite growing in scale and reach since its launch in 2017, the programme’s engagement sadly suffered during the covid pandemic, when the programme’s usual delivery methods were disrupted, and the workloads of teachers put under immense strain.
In the post-covid climate, Surfers Against Sewage asked us to help re-engage its audiences with a comprehensive communications audit, with clear recommendations for a fresh strategy that would be easy to implement across a small team. They also asked us to support them with research and content creation for a new social community group for teachers.
CONTENT CREATION
PFS Email Comms Audit & Re-engagement Strategy
After conducting an in-depth review of PFS’ recent email campaigns, analysing engagement levels, contents and audience lists, we provided SAS with a comprehensive report, breaking down each finding into digestible points with tangible actions and recommendations alongside it.
To ensure PFS’ campaigns have the best possible chance of success before hitting ‘send’, we reviewed:
- Database
- Send-out times
- Re-sends, re-engagement & referrals
- Content length
- Template design
Alongside our audit, we crafted a survey designed to gain insights directly from PFS’ audiences, focusing on when and how they like to receive comms from PFS. We also made recommendations on potential new content streams for PFS, including utilising moment marketing and user-generated content.
PFS Community Page Social Strategy
The goal of strategy was twofold; to engage teachers in PFS-organised Teacher Training sessions, as well as setting up a community networking page for the PFS cohort, with a communications strategy for the launch. We helped with the following:
- Developing a comms launch plan for the PFS Teacher Training sessions.
- Consulting on the most suitable platform for their new community space.
- Creating a content calendar & communications strategy for the new PFS teacher Facebook page.
For the content calendar, we developed an array of content ideas to keep teachers engaged through the summer months, taking into consideration calendar moments, like Plastic Free July and Back to School, to inform the content we wrote and ideated. We include draft copy for polls, action plans, tips, case studies, video ideas, weekly community conversation starters and more.
BRAND IMPACT
At the time of writing this (18/08/23), the Plastic Free Schools programme has reached 1,430,029 pupils, providing them with campaigning skills and empowering them to tackle unnecessary single-use plastic everywhere. Great work!
“We loved working with Creature & Co. to revamp our email communications and support us in building a new online community for the educators we work with. Creature & Co. were flexible, timely and really did the research to understand our brief, offering insightful and creative ideas and giving us the structure needed to implement them.” – Evelyn Hull, Education Coordinator, Surfers Against Sewage
