Channel 4’s ‘Britain’s Forgotten Children’ season online PR

The client

As a public service broadcaster Channel 4 has an educational remit must demonstrate the reach and impact their programmes to justify the public funding they receive.

The centrepiece to their Spring 2009 schedule was a big campaigning season on “Britain’s Forgotten Children” – a week of programmes about the thousands of children trapped in the care system.

The challenge

Channel 4 held a season of programmes on the care system (adoption, fostering and care) which we helped promote via an online awareness campaign. Channel 4 wanted to spark a major debate on this issue with a range of programmes including “Adopt me” – a big 3-part documentary series on finding homes for hard to adopt kids; special editions of Cutting Edge and Dispatches, plus a powerful single Drama “The Unloved” from the Oscar nominated actress Samantha Morton.

Key objectives were to:

Map out who (and where) is currently talking online about adoption
Identify groups, websites and individuals online that are not currently talking about adoption that Channel 4 would like to spark conversation and debate within (e.g. Mums on sites such as mumsnet.com)
Through engagement with these identified spaces, stimulate debate and conversation where there previously were none or very little
Measure and demonstrate increased conversation online within social media spaces, as a result of the Channel 4 season and stimulated by online engagement.

This campaign focused specifically on adoption.

The results

132% increase in conversations online around the topic of adoption during and after the season
165% increase in forum conversation around the topic of adoption during and after the season
Significant uplift in Google search volume for the term ‘adoption’ as shown on Google Trends during the season

This project was delivered in April 2009 by Ross Breadmore & Anna Carlson