Despite being a long established and well trusted brand, An Post, Ireland’s national postal service was a brand losing relevance. In 2018, the brand commenced a programme of transformation, making significant moves designed to secure and create a bright future.

This led to a new brand new purpose, to improve the quality of life for Irish people, expressed through its new brand platform, ‘For Your World’. Alongside a refreshed brand identity and updated product launch, An Post wanted to activate its purpose and show An Post’s relevance today.

Improving the quality of life for everyone in Ireland meant addressing the number one issue facing Ireland, a national housing crisis. The quality of life for everyone was at risk but the nation’s attention was focused on the numbers identifying as homeless which for the first time in history in March 2019, hit over 10,000.

The cruel irony of homelessness is that to get help, you need an address. As a brand committed to improving the quality of life for all of the people of Ireland, An Post sought to find a way to provide homeless people with an address. While we cannot fix the issue of adequate housing, we believed that we could improve access to essential services and create an infrastructure that stood to break the cycle of homelessness and address a national issue. This was a credible brand activation for An Post as only a postal service could deliver such a solution.

With an address, we are giving people the means to access essential national services that to date, have been unnecessarily limited to those with a fixed address, breaking the cycle of homelessness by improving access to:

• Health services

• Housing

• Education

• Employment

To understand how best to execute this solution, we hosted research groups with members of the homeless community and the target audience. We established that the address needed to be:

• Flexible – To reflect the nomadic nature of life as someone who is homeless

• Free – To leave no one behind

• Human – It needs to feel like a real address and not a P.O Box, to reduce stigma

• Simple- The experience of signing up needed to be a two-step process using simple language and minimal data commitment

A secondary consideration was also creating a blueprint that could be easily adopted by other postal services around the world to provide this solution in other countries facing a similar issue.

Successfully delivering this solution and communicating it to our target audience stood to position An Post as a brand relevant to today’s world.

Address Point is a free nationwide service that provides a fixed address to those without a fixed home. It enables them to access essential services by creating a fixed proxy address at a local post office where they can collect their post at a time and place convenient to them. All users need to collect post is some photo id. If they move to a different part of the country, they can generate a new address for their new area of temporary residence.

Address Point is accessible via the internet and is a simple two step journey requiring only a name and preferred location to be submitted. An address is then generated which can be saved as a photo or written down manually. It borrows the post office’s physical address and includes a unique identifier that notifies the post master to hold the post at the post office for collection.

In the first 4 weeks since launch Address Point and An Post have had 220 Million earned media impressions, potentially taking up 7.8%* of the Irish population's newsfeeds on launch day.

Posts flooded social media celebrating An Post’s purpose and dedication to a national crisis, cementing its place as a brand relevant to all Irish people today.

90 Pieces of news coverage, featured across every national newspaper and major national broadcast stations including prime time news on our national TV and radio broadcaster, RTE.

Sentiment was 99% positive, with the most used words in media being practical, essential and inclusive, showing that the brand had successfully connected its purpose with the audience.

Post launch, An Post has been consulting with a number of postal networks around the world, sharing this innovative blueprint solution and helping them provide a similar service in their country, extending its purpose beyond Ireland.