One Year Later - How it Happened: The Strategy Behind Our Successful Parliamentary Petition
One year ago we reached our goal of over 100,000 signatures on our petition to create a statutory duty of care. Throughout this campaign we received incredible support from many different individuals and organisations, one being TBD Marketing.
Following the success of the petition the CEO of the company, Simon Marshall, wrote the following blog post to highlight their input. Reading it back a year on, we thought it was a brilliant way to remember the events which lead us to parliament…
How TBD helped out ForThe100
Written by Simon Marshall
As our regular readers are fully aware by now, TBD has spent much of the past six weeks busily championing ForThe100, a campaign group set up to create a statutory duty of care for students whilst at university and thus hopefully bring down the number of student suicides, which currently averages around 100 a year (a shocking number that inspired the name of the campaign).
The Government contends that universities already have a general duty of care, and that a change in the law is therefore superfluous. But here’s the thing they seem to be ignoring: the system as it stands simply isn’t working. Students are falling through the cracks, and they are dying as a result. It seems obvious to most right-thinking people that universities – which, let’s not forget, demand up to £9,000 in fees per year from their young charges – need to be made to take a greater degree of responsibility for the welfare of their students while under their care.
A key pillar of this mission to effect change was to set up an e-petition and get 100,000 signatures by 19 March in order to have the matter debated before parliament. Our services were recommended by Bellevue Law’s Georgina Calvert-Lee, and we were initially brought on board to help with the marketing campaign to raise awareness of Forthe100 in general and the e-petition in particular.
We were able to take this project from a successful legal-technical update campaign with around 25,000 signatures three weeks before the deadline, and transform it into an effective hearts-and-minds marketing campaign that gained celebrity support (including from Deborah Meaden) and achieved 128,293 signatures – more than enough to see the topic of a statutory duty of care for students debated before parliament in the coming months.
How did we do this? Well, once we were brought on board, the first thing that Sophie and I recognised was that the campaign was coming to the end of what we might term the first phase, comprising the technical-legal approach for encouraging people to sign up. What do I mean? Simply put, it was clear that everyone who would logically buy into the campaign had already done so: all the people who were already aware of the high rates of suicide amongst students at university had by now signed the petition, and we had therefore hit saturation point with this demographic.
Sophie and I thus sought ways to appeal to a wider audience. We quickly realised that many of the parents of students lost to suicide hadn’t had the opportunity to collectively voice their grief and their upset at the present situation. This is what inspired the idea of holding a vigil outside three different universities (London, Bristol and Edinburgh) where the loved ones of campaign members had died by suicide. I can see the Wills Memorial Building, where we held the Bristol University vigil, from my office window. This has always felt personal to me.
The nature of the vigil concentrated everyone’s minds on the visual aspects of the campaign: the striking and symbolic imagery of candlelight; the sight of parents, relatives and friends as a collective, commemorating their loved ones and telling their stories of loss – this was crucial to physically embodying the campaign in the minds of the public. And the media.
Suddenly, the ForThe100 campaigners went from a position of trying to persuade the media to take an interest, to being able to talk to the public via the medium of radio and TV about the devastation they have suffered as the result of student suicide, and what needs to change in order to prevent other families from having to go through the same experience. And this media coverage ultimately enabled the personal outpourings which led to the e-petition being the most popular petition on the UK Government and Parliament Petitions website and achieving well over the 100,000 required signatures.
A group of campaigners gathered outside the Wills Memorial Building in Bristol.
And so we helped ForThe100 to evolve from a geographically disparate set of campaigns into a coherent and cohesive group that spoke with one collective voice. It was my impression that the parents and families weren’t quite ready to tell heart-felt stories before Sophie and I entered the fray – I believe that we helped them to realise that this emotional catharsis would be the defining element in gaining the necessary traction, and supported them in focusing on and achieving this one, concrete goal: getting enough signatures for the petition. Anything else was just noise.
Maxine Carrick – mum of Oskar, who took his own life in 2021 while studying at Sheffield Hallam University – in particular made a huge difference by being willing to tell her story. Her work on Facebook ultimately brought in well over half of the additionally required signatures. So much for Facebook being a spent force – if you work in Business-to-Consumer Law, you definitely need to keep Facebook in your marketing arsenal, because personal stories that resonate with audiences will always prove effective on this channel. And telling such stories in a way that has the most powerful impact is one the things we do best at TBD.
In total, we believe that the ForThe100 campaign achieved 40 to 50 million media impressions. One million impressions alone came from a tweet by Hilary Grime, the mother of Phoebe, a Newcastle University student who died by suicide in 2021. We certainly did face some constraints in getting the story out there. ITV and the BBC weren’t too keen to get involved until the petition was over, for fear of being accused of political bias. But since we got the petition over the line, ForThe100 has featured on BBC Breakfast and elsewhere on the BBC network, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky. More is planned with the families in the coming days.
This graph shows the trajectory of signatures over the course of the petition.
This is all great news, of course. To use a mountaineering metaphor, we have made it to base camp. And as anyone who has ever been to Mount Everest base camp (or, in my case, watched the appropriate Netflix documentaries) knows, getting to this point is a hell of an achievement in itself.