The housing team at Central Bedfordshire Council came to us in 2020 with an urgent need to address the issue of homelessness. Specifically, they were receiving an average of 45 homeless presentations a week, more than half of which were from households who had reached crisis point.

When contacted for help at such a late stage, the team found it difficult to step in and offer support. It was also placing a great deal of pressure on the service and the need for temporary accommodation. So, our aim was to encourage at-risk people to come forward much earlier in the process, to allow the team the time they needed to intervene.

The first challenge to overcome was a general lack of awareness over the support available from the council, so we knew we needed to raise awareness via localised outdoor marketing and digital channels. The second challenge – overcoming the stigma that prevented people from accessing help – meant taking a fresh look at the imagery we’ve come to associate with homelessness.

Based on feedback from various workshops, we designed our Closer To Home campaign around the idea of humanising homelessness. We created relatable images to show how it’s possible for anyone to lose their home, teamed with text designed to encourage proactivity and show that prevention is possible if help is sought early on. We communicated these through a mix of digital and outdoor advertising, and completely redesigned the council’s homelessness webpages.

We were privileged to work alongside the team on this campaign over a long period of time, starting before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and navigating a period of huge change. As the pandemic progressed, the fallout completely changed the demographic of who was at risk of homelessness, and our campaign became even more vital.

The results of the social campaign show a huge increase in engagement, with the social post showing up to 57% higher engagement rate than the average engagement rate of posts on the Central Bedfordshire Council social media platforms. Geo locate targeted advertising across the borough run over the course of 12 weeks resulted in a conversion rate nearly double the industry average.

Crucially though, government insight data indicates that prevention applications for CBC at the end of the campaign was 53%, compared to the national average of 46.5%, resulting in successful prevention outcomes that are 17% higher than the national average. CBC had a 52% increase in cases that were classed as prevention rather than crisis from the start of the campaign to December 2021.

These results demonstrate that the campaign was successfully driving more people to engage council services at an earlier stage of potential homelessness, meaning there was a reduction in crisis situations which has allowed CBC to put more interventions in place to help avoid people becoming homeless.