Fighting for policymakers' and politicians' attention during a surprise UK general election.
The Challenge
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change hosts its exclusive one-day event, the Future of Britain, every year. In 2024, the theme was Reimagining the State in the Age of AI. We smashed expectations using social media to create engagement and a livestream audience.
This invitation-only event gathers senior civil servants, policymakers, politicians, influencers, think tanks, and NGOs in central London. However, it is also live-streamed; an essential measure of its impact is engaging a wider government, civil service, policymaking and engaged citizen audience via the livestream.
Our job as their social media agency was to maximise live stream registrations and engagement with this difficult-to-reach audience in the lead-up, on the day, and after the event across owned and paid social media. Objectives:
Primary
- Exceed Future of Britain 2023’s live-stream registrations
Secondary
- Exceed 2023 email subscriptions
- Exceed TBI newsletter subscriptions
These objectives became more challenging on May 22nd when Rishi Sunak announced a snap election for July 4th, just four days before the event.
The Solution
A six pillar approach
The approach was built on six pillars of social activity using paid and organic social media. While we knew that posts like speaker announcements and event info would be business-as-usual, we believed thematic content around issues, combined with accurately targeted audiences in paid social media would be key to increasing effectiveness.
Two audience groups
1. Primary. Professional: Politicians, ministers, advisors, NGOs, senior civil servants and policymakers
2. Secondary. Future Leaders: politically engaged young people
With this in mind, we developed a master messaging and value proposition framework that connected themes on the UK political agenda to the impact they have on consumer perception.
The strategy was to link consumer issues to the more clinical themes that occupy professional audiences, and then tease the opportunities AI presents to solve them. The hope was that using the real concerns of UK voters that would be under the spotlight of a general election, would create cut through to our primary audience.
Creating a message format that allowed for responsive, targeted messaging with high consistency
We expanded the master framework into a messaging grid for thematic awareness content for our professional audience in organic and paid social media.
We developed a ‘hook, line, and sinker’ format that hard-wired the strategy into the messaging. This allowed us to build out consistent and coherent messages around real issues affecting the UK today.
A phased approach that built momentum towards the event
With the strategy in place, we planned content to maximise impact in the lead-up to the event. We reserved the paid media for a burst in the week before the event and for the on-the-day activity to encourage people to join the live stream. This allowed us to build momentum and online engagement leading up to the event.
A targeted approach in paid media
We used paid media on LinkedIn to target our difficult-to-reach professional audience, Meta to reach Young Leaders, and Meta and X (Twitter) for on-the-day engagement.
On the day live coverage
At the conference, we created reactive posts with behind-the-scenes content and vox pops to extend the experience to a wider audience.
The Results
Results smashed expectations
The campaign smashed all expectations despite the snap general election and a belief that 2023 was a high bar of effectiveness to beat.
Objectives and result:
1 - Exceed Future of Britain 2023’s live-stream registrations = +49% compared to 2023
2 - Exceed Future of Britain 2023 email subscription uplift = +28% compared to 2023
3 - Exceed TBI newsletter subscriptions = +23% compared to 2023
Quality-over-quantity in paid media
We took a quality-over-quantity approach to paid media. This was a success, particularly on LinkedIn, where a lower number of clicks (-15% YoY) delivered a dramatically higher number of registrations for the live stream (+49% YoY) for a similar media spend.
Get in touch to discuss campaigns for your organisation.
