2009 – Armed Forces Day social campaign
The Brief
The campaign objectives were to raise public awareness and support for Armed Forces Day and consisted of a number of social media engagements designed to increase participation, and encourage a celebration of the forces, veterans and the wider forces family, honouring the work they do.
The social campaign ran concurrently with the website – the websites’s function was to broadcast content whilst the social platforms were used to drive awareness, build support and community engagement, provide shareable content for WOM distribution on digital platforms, drive traffic to and increase awareness of www.armedforcesday.co.uk and support the wider media campaign for Armed Forces Day.
Platforms and Approach:
We centralised information about the event, how to get involved, participate and organise via the website. And used social platforms to approach and build support for the cause to develop momentum for AFDay. Supporters and contributors quickly picked up on the campaign, involving themselves with digital activities such as “Raising the Flag” (Messages of support via Twitter integrated to the website homepage) and growth of the Facebook Fanpage. Interactions with this page were mindblowing, towards the day itself we had 1-3 people joining the page per minute, a digital collective working towards a 10,000 number of members by 5pm the Friday before AFD. Other strange happenings included a wave of photos being posted from fans flying their flags (out of windows, in their loungerooms etc). And a hypnotic desire for bumper stickers – again with photos posted once displayed by proud car owners 
Results:
- Website had a 600+% improvement from year before – with an increase of 1400,000 unique visitors
- Twitter campaign – currently 8,690 and growing – notable 2009 RT’s included Eddie Izzard, Lord Drayson, Sarah Brown, Boris Johnson. (London Mayor)
- Facebook fans – currently 989,374 and growing
- Flickr Childrens Art Competition – 192 entries
- Photos uploaded to Flickr by fans from events attended – over 6,000
- A post campaign survey (sentiment) indicated an overwhelming support for the approach, with 98.7% surveyed saying they were satisfied with the experience and 99.8% saying they would be supporting again the following year.
- The most notable and powerful result for me was the provision of a social space for families and the general public to come together (FB in particular) and share their experiences of having loved ones at war and show messages of support for the troops and families. We also had comments from people who had served to say that the public support messages were a huge boost to morale. We recommended to ‘close the circle’ in the coming year with messages of support directly to the troops – the people saying a collective social thank-you.
