This campaign had an unusual objective. Get children singing!Our client is Sing Up! A national initiative to get singing back into classrooms in England. This is not as easy as it sounds. Teachers are busy people. They have targets to hit and tight guidelines about what they can teach.So we created The Big School Sing Up! A national competition that captured teachers’ and kids’ imaginations by harnessing the sense of locality and community which every school is part of.To do this, we recruited local radio stations around the country to effectively run the campaign for us, using their influence within their local community to create excitement and involvement. Local DJs are local celebrities, and radio stations are community hubs that speak to people on their level.Uniquely, the campaign was delivered using no advertising. We knew from the start everything had to be part of station editorial.

The results exceeded all our expectations. Over 1000 schools participated. Double our target. Almost 20% of all the schools in the country visited the website or requested more information and we delivered £2m of media value over and above our budget.

We spent a lot of time with the stations up front, dealing not just with the ad sales department but with the DJs and programming teams. This meant that we got genuine support from everyone. The programme moved from being an ad buy to something that we all had a stake in the success of and, within the guidelines laid down by us, the stations were allowed to develop activity as they felt would be most powerful.By knitting the message into the fabric of each station – on air DJ endorsement, using the stations themselves as event venues, school visits from outside broadcast teams and the final opportunity to be heard performing on air – we ensured that the campaign didn’t feel like another worthy, national initiative with a big ad budget, but something more local and personal that people had a real chance to get involved with.

In total, 64 radio stations across England were part of the 5 week programme. In the first two weeks, teachers were invited to events at the stations where they could meet local celebrities and sign up.Word spread fast. By week 3, the stations were inundated with calls from schools wanting to participate. We actually had to assign ‘account managers’ at the stations to deal with the volume of interest. The programme was also getting coverage in the national media, driving interest still further.In weeks 3 & 4, the live reads and on air plugging drove people to the website to upload their songs. Stations were also travelling out to schools to help them record their entries. The final week was the climax, with songs being broadcast in the morning and afternoon ‘school-run’ segments, and the DJs directing people to listen in and wait for their school’s appearance.