Helping children smile again

With almost 8,000 UK children needing a foster family, the National Fostering Agency (NFA) asked Cherry Tiger to help them recruit more foster carers. The challenge was to deliver a strong lead generation campaign, across digital and social media channels. And in a fragmented and competitive market, differentiating NFA as the fostering agency of choice was key.

Foster caring is an enormously rewarding vocation, but it’s also a big commitment. What would motivate potential foster carers to enquire? We identified that it tends to begin with a strong emotional commitment to helping children. Secondly we proposed using existing foster carers to show that fostering is open to people from a diverse range of backgrounds. Finally, we suggested that NFA social workers, who work closely with all their foster families, could best explain all the support available.

This insight led us to design a three-pronged social and digital campaign focusing firstly on powerful videos of children, followed up by retargeting stories from existing foster carers and social workers. We wrapped up all three stages of the campaign in an umbrella positioning, labelled ‘That’s our kind of fostering’ which helped NFA to ‘own’ a unique approach. Key to the success of the campaign was how we worked with other media partners to propose compelling Facebook video posts and digital display banners, from which leads were captured on dedicated landing pages, and followed up by email, print and face-to-face support materials. The whole campaign involving three video and photo shoots and multiple creative strands was delivered in the space of just three weeks.