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The challenge
The community-led housing movement comprises hundreds of innovative local groups across the country developing housing specifically for the needs of their communities, using a variety of models.
Against the backdrop of a national housing crisis, we were tasked by World Habitat with promoting community-led housing to the general public in order to engage, educate and inspire.
Our aim was to demonstrate what was possible for those considering getting involved by joining an existing housing project, or starting their own, and also to promote community-led housing to those in housing need who may not have been aware of the options.
The solution
To highlight the incredible, life-changing work of community-led housing groups, we set out on a mission to visit projects across the country and tell their stories. There we interviewed project leaders to get to the heart of the housing need in that area and the creative solutions being delivered through collective community effort, at various stages of planning and completion.
Crucially, we also interviewed members of the public in those communities who had or were due to benefit from community-led housing, discovering the difficulties they had faced in their housing situations previously, and just how life-transforming the new housing opportunity was for them.
Our task was then to bring these human-interest stories to life with the impact needed to inspire others, which we achieved through a mixture of press releases and stories tailored to different channels and audiences. We delivered professional photography for each story, illustrating the people and environments at the centre of the projects – this also formed a large bank of images for World Habitat to use.
Establishing links with print journalists from national and local news, trade press, and wider magazines, plus TV and radio contacts, we distributed content in a targeted way to achieve broad print, digital and broadcast media coverage.
We also created and managed social media channels for the project, sharing content far and wide to engage with the public, the media, and organisations.