UKSA

UKSA wanted to raise awareness of the importance of outdoor education and its outcomes whilst harnessing Outdoor Classroom Day (4 November 2021).

In a normal year, UKSA is proud to welcome over 8,000 schoolchildren for water-based, residential experiences that are both life-affirming and enhancing. It also runs a fully-funded, half-day on the water for all Island Year 6 pupils, which supports 1,500 beneficiaries annually. Through this activity, it has first-hand evidence that outdoor centres like UKSA help young peoples’ mental health and confidence, build resilience, and instil life skills – all of which are essential attributes for young people. Additionally, the healing power of water and coastal environments have been shown to improve our health, body and mind, which is why it is more essential than ever for young people – especially those from inner cities – to have on-water, outdoor and out-of-classroom experiences.

The charity wanted to reach target audiences of regional and national audiences both generally and with education providers to promote its offering.

We wanted to promote the benefits of outdoor learning to mental health, which has been particularly pertinent post-pandemic, and to make people aware that the UKSA offers funded places so there are no barriers to youngsters experiencing outdoor learning and taking up its educational pathways.

The three-month campaign began with undertaking research to find out more about the outdoor education sector. We contacted the Institute of Outdoor Learning to discover more about the impact of outdoor learning on young people to give wider context to our campaign.

The Social Mobility Commission’s 2020 report ‘An Unequal Playing Field: Extra-Curricular Activities, Soft Skills and Social Mobility’ clearly demonstrates that participation in activities beyond the classroom has great added value in a child’s development. Not having access to or not being able to participate in these activities is a significant restraint on social mobility. This guided us to highlight that UKSA’s programmes offer a positive and enriching experience for young people – not only as positive educational outcomes, but also as they offer the possibility of developing a wider set of skills beyond the qualifications obtained from school.

Our strategy followed a multi-narrative approach to target different audiences and highlight the different pathways. We developed a communications plan that included feature placement, press visits, interviews and press announcements.

We developed a campaign calendar, which harnessed Outdoor Classroom Day and other campaign ‘moments’ such as interviews, school visits and press announcements, to ensure a steady drumbeat of communication over the three-month campaign.

After getting a mixture of case studies to promote from both individual (Logan) and education providers, we worked to place these, as well as highlighting statistics from UKSA; these were all released to the media over the course of the campaign. A focus was put on regional media for Outdoor Classroom Day to ensure maximum coverage from outlets which could access UKSA; this included BBC South attending a school’s visit to UKSA, and placement of a UKSA spokesperson on BBC Radio Solent to talk about the day itself and the importance of outdoor learning.

We also worked with UKSA’s internal social media team to highlight the overall campaign coverage, using the hashtag #OutdoorEducation.