A film project involving more than 80 council fostering teams that’s on the shortlist for this year’s UnAwards shows how collaboration on a grand scale is both doable and fruitful.
by John Cooper
Fostering is so important to outcomes for children in care. A recent Ofsted survey found that of all the children currently in foster care who responded, 99% said they “always feel safe” where they live and are more likely to “always feel safe” than children in other types of care.
Last Christmas, the John Lewis Partnership was rightly praised for using its festive TV advert to throw a spotlight on fostering thanks to a memorable turn from a skateboarding dad. But clearly, fostering a child isn’t just for Christmas and, according to The Fostering Network charity, over the next 12 months another 7,200 foster families are needed across the UK to make sure all the children who need fostering get appropriate care.
A brilliant thing about ‘Any Of Us’, the short film on fostering that made the shortlist for “Best Collaboration” at UnAwards 2023, is that – unlike the John Lewis ad – it works all year round. The dozens of fostering services who contributed to the project can use it to keep encouraging people from all backgrounds to take the first step into foster care. And they only needed to chip in an average of around £1,000 each towards production, administrative and launch event costs.
A great idea that grew and grew
For the past two years, we at CAN (along with production company Reel TwentyFive) have managed a project to create these short films that pack a punch and get people thinking about becoming a foster carer.
Last year’s film – “Childhood” – was shortlisted for many national and international awards, picking up the “Nicolas Roeg Award for Best Short Film” at the Birmingham Film and Television Festival over the summer.
This year’s UnAwards shortlisted film – “Any Of Us” – is actually the fifth council fostering film collaboration to be jointly funded by council fostering services. Rachel Brown, formerly of Coventry City Council’s fostering team – who submitted the entry on behalf of all councils taking part – is the originator of the concept. Rachel started the project seven years ago, originally collaborating with around a dozen other councils in the Midlands. Since then, the project has grown and grown.
The intention across all the films is not only to encourage people to consider providing a loving home for children in care but, crucially, to do so with your local authority fostering service rather than an Independent Fostering Agency (IFA). Children placed with IFA foster carers usually end up further from their schools, families, and everything else that is familiar to them. Also, every fostering household recruited saves council fostering services around £20k a year, by avoiding expensive IFA fees.
And that means millions of pounds in total could be saved by council fostering services if most children were placed with their own foster carers. And we all know, only too well, how cash-strapped councils continue to be and how much good work children’s services could do with this extra money.
Proving comms has real-world outcomes
One of the things Rachel Brown sought to highlight in the UnAwards entry for “Best Collaboration” is not just that you can create a brilliant piece of content when you work in partnership, but that you can make a massive difference to real-world outcomes if that content is used in a smart way.
It takes proper amplification for content to attract more – and a wider variety of – people than those who just follow council social media accounts. Your campaign strategy needs to include investment in paid-for strategies so the 92% of the population who are online see it on their favourite feeds and websites.
In the first month after “Any of Us” was launched, the 54 councils who reported their metrics between them achieved around 250,000 views of the film and almost 10,000 clicks to fostering webpages with organic media. That’s good. But the 16 councils who used paid-for media on Meta social channels and YouTube to promote the film had over 550,000 paid views and 15,000 paid clicks to their fostering pages between them!
With 249 new enquiries attributable to film views in just the first month, the council fostering community will save £394,000 on IFA placement fees. This figure has been calculated from average enquiry-to-approval data, which indicates that this number of enquiries would result in 21 new foster carers within the next year.
Most importantly, outcomes for children in care will improve. There will be fewer children being placed with IFA foster carers, far away from home, and more being supported by their own communities as they grow up.
These results also proved to many of the fostering teams involved that, by working together, they could achieve things they considered “out of reach”. The project helped them prove to internal stakeholders that investing more in smarter recruitment marketing is worthwhile. I know of three councils already who have had approval to increase investment in foster care comms because of conversations around the film project.
Share the burden – save your sanity
Fostering campaigns – indeed most council campaigns that support long-term service outcomes – are time-consuming, resource-heavy, and costly. But through collaboration, amazing things happen. You can share creative assets, costs, messaging, best practice, and benchmarking data – learning and growing as one supportive community.
I host the Fostering Recruitment Hub, a free-to-join growing community of professionals who are involved in local authority fostering recruitment. This takes the concept of collaboration to a much bigger level. It’s now a movement for council fostering recruitment! We meet regularly online with experts to provide support and advice on all kinds of themes relating to fostering recruitment. Sign up and join us.
Away from fostering, earlier this month, we at CAN held the first of our new “comms community” webinars – for those who communicate Public Health campaigns on the NHS side through ICBs, or on the council side. We’re hoping to play in part in strengthening these relationships with the help of Russell Cartwright, AD for comms at NHS South-East London ICS – especially through another period of decreasing budgets and restructuring teams. You can sign up to join the Public Health Comms Hub if it would be useful to your role.
John Cooper is CAN’s fostering specialist and organiser of the Fostering Recruitment Hub. You can drop him an email at: john.cooper@can-digital.net
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