The Brief
Barley has worked with veterans’ housing charity Stoll over a four-year period. In 2019 we supported the launch of Stoll’s No Homeless Veterans campaign aimed at engaging local authorities in preventing veterans’ homelessness by taking the first step of ascertaining whether people seeking help with homeless are veterans and reporting this. Our integrated campaign spanned media, social media and public affairs to achieve this goal.
Insights and Approach
We created a central campaign video that would live on the website and social media, along with a case study video to celebrate the people working in social housing provision and local councils who support veterans to access housing.
Key to the success of the campaign was the need to raise the profile of issue among parliamentarians. We held a House of Lords reception attended by ministers to launch new research outlining the scale of the issue. This was integrated closely with our media outreach. Whilst the reception was underway, we arranged interviews nearby with homeless veterans on BBC Radio 5Live and Sky News.
The Outcome
The campaign was a success. MHCLG changed its guidance so that local authorities were mandated to include the numbers of homeless veterans in their quarterly housing returns.
We continued communications to ensure local authorities were supported to put this into practice. We worked in conjunction with 20 housing and veterans’ organisations to produce guidance for local authorities. And we re-cut video footage celebrating the success of the campaign which was shared at 100 in-person briefings with local authorities to showcase best practice in action.
245
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500
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followers on social
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