Street to School
Aviva’s global Street to School programme recognises that every child living or working on the
street should have the right to fulfil their potential. Our aim by 2015 is to help 500,000
children living or working on the street get back into everyday life and achieve their hidden
potential. In the UK, an estimated 100,000 young people run away every year, often ending
up on our streets1. Through the Street to School programme in the UK, Aviva has partnered
with the charity Railway Children which fights to help these vulnerable young people.
Since launching the UK partnership in 2010, both organisations have already seen the value
of creating this integrated programme, which continues to grow and deliver mutual benefit
over time. We have three core objectives which are: to raise awareness of the issue and
charity (making a long-term sustainable difference); to drive positive brand differentiation; and
to increase employee engagement. This is what we have delivered to date:
• 1,493 children at risk have been helped through the UK programme and a further
32,114 children and young people have been reached through runaway awareness
and prevention education.
• £1,125,370 has been given to Railway Children (cash and benefits in kind), including
£147,000 triggered through ‘£ per policy’ and other customer incentives
• Over £500,000 has been invested by Aviva in addition to this, for marketing and
activation of the UK programme
• Over 6 million UK consumers have been reached through direct/white space
marketing, with a further 38.2 million reached through campaign activity
• Prompted public awareness of Railway Children’s brand has reached 6% and Aviva’s
Street to School programme has reached 8%
• 15% of UK employees are actively involved through volunteering, fundraising or
donating, raising over £200,000 in donations
Introduction and background
Building on a long track record of community investment, Aviva’s Street to School programme
is a five-year global commitment to meeting the needs of children living or working on the
streets, in the communities in which we live and work.
As Aviva’s first cause-related marketing programme, we wanted to get behind something that
has a genuine fit with our brand values. The research we carried out with consumers,
employees and advisers indicated that the Street to School theme resonated strongly with
people around the world.
Our customers buy insurance, savings and investments to look after themselves and their
families. But sadly, many street children have no-one to protect and care for them. Aviva’s
Street to School programme makes a connection between our brand purpose of providing
prosperity and peace of mind for our customers and the need to do the same for these
vulnerable children.
In some countries around the world, street children’s existence is so prevalent it has almost
become ‘normal’; in the UK, society often denies their existence and it remains a hidden
issue. Our Street to School programme’s UK partnership with Railway Children is a step
towards recognising the unrecognised.
Railway Children is a charity that fights for vulnerable children who live alone and at risk on
the streets, where they suffer abuse and exploitation. Their focus on the estimated 100,0002
children who run away or are forced to leave home in the UK every year, provides us with the
necessary expertise to support these young people in the most valuable way.
Launch strategy and first steps:
Our partnership was officially launched in September 2010 following a nationwide ‘Sleepout’3
held by Aviva employees in May, raising £100,000 to kick-start Aviva’s support of Railway
Children. In June 2010, Aviva’s intermediary teams also donated a percentage of that
month’s revenue to Railway Children, encouraging brokers to get involved with a wall of
recognition, raising a further £110,000.
To mark the launch, we teamed up with The Big Issue to produce a one-off edition of the
magazine called The Little Issue? With 50,000 copies distributed free inside The Big Issue
across the UK, the magazine drew attention to the plight of young runaways. John Bird,
founder and editor in chief of The Big Issue, said: “This a great project for us – most people
know what we stand for in general terms but this represents an important opportunity for us to
focus on one very specific area of life on the streets.”
We also held two schools-based events, supported by the highly-acclaimed sports stars
Dame Kelly Holmes and Darren Campbell MBE, allowing us to take the message directly to
the age group most likely to be affected by the issues associated with running away.
The collaborative nature of our cause-related marketing strategy has allowed us to create an
integrated programme of activity that delivers mutual benefit for both organisations. At the
heart of this is our ability to embed the activity in the way we do business by communicating
with our customers, engaging our employees and building measurable outcomes for the
cause. As such, our core objectives are based around these three goals: cause; employees
and customer and brand.
Building on the success of the launch, with an estimated media reach of over 14 million, we
invested time in exploring how we could make a long-term, sustainable difference to the
cause. We recognised that, first and foremost, we needed to start raising awareness of the
issue. Initial findings told us that only 12% of people perceived the issue to affect over 10,000
young people each year in the UK; with no-one recognising the true extent of the estimated
100,000 figure.4
An initial survey also demonstrated 0% spontaneous awareness and 5% prompted
awareness of Railway Children’s brand5; so in a climate where their counterparts such as
NSPCC and Save the Children are reaching 42% and 25% spontaneous recognition
respectively6, it was clear that we also needed to raise awareness of the charity itself.
By developing a joint-branded marketing toolkit of collateral, our first step was to encourage
integration of Street to School messaging across our existing marketing propositions,
including:
• inserts in policy mailings;
• banners on our websites;
• articles in our customer ezines;
• full-page ads in our sports sponsorship programmes;
• a video embedded in the ITV red button service7;
• content on our customer letters; and
• the creation of a dedicated micro-site where people could go to find out more8.
Collectively, this messaging reached over 1 million customers in 2010 and has since reached
a further 4 million in 2011.
Impacts:
At the heart of our communications is the positive impact we aim to have on young people
themselves. In response to findings from their research, ‘Off the Radar’, Railway Children
developed an innovative best practice model called the Reach model that brings together key
services as a safety net for children on the streets in the UK. We work closely with Railway
Children to agree where to deploy funds to support this.
Since 2010, Aviva has funded:
• a worker at a refuge called Safe@Last in Sheffield, supporting some of the most
vulnerable young people in South Yorkshire on a 1:1 basis;
• a Runaway Education Officer who works with local schools around South Yorkshire to
educate young people in runaway awareness and prevention; and
• an Information and Learning Officer for Railway Children, to support our long-term
aim of showing how the Reach model can be replicated across the UK.
Aviva has also invested in a further two of Railway Children’s projects:
• Running Other Choices (ROC) - identified as an essential service providing
Scotland’s only refuge for young runaways under the age of 18 who feel unable to
return home. Since 2011, Aviva’s investment has supported the on-going operation
of ROC (which was previously at risk of closing), offering a safe place to stay, advice
and an essential prevention education programme in Central Scotland.
• a new project, launched in November 2011, as part of a collaboration between
Railway Children and Barnardo’s; extending the existing Barnardo’s Miss U service in
Camden and funding new services in Islington and Haringey to grow the network of
on-the-ground support for young runaways across North London.
Through our partnership with Railway Children, we have reached 33,607 young people
across the UK to date, ranging from direct intervention with those most at risk to runaway
education awareness and prevention (RAP) lessons in schools.
Employee engagement:
Our employee volunteers have made a significant contribution to the programme to date,
including the investment of over 650 hours in delivering RAP lessons to primary schools
around the UK. We recognise that harnessing the power of our employee’s support is vital
and currently, 82% of our 17,000 employees are aware of the programme. Further to this, at
the end of 2011, 15% of our employees were actively engaged with the programme, having
raised over £200,000 for Railway Children to date.
We offer a number of ways for employees to get involved, with Railway Children as Aviva’s
charity of choice for our ‘Pennies from Heaven’ scheme; the option to select them as Payroll
Giving beneficiaries and a ‘£Plus’ scheme that matches fundraising of up to £100 per
employee per year. We also held a second ‘sleepout’ event in 2011, where employees were
sponsored to spend a night on the streets and almost 300 employees took part in our ‘Back to
School’ challenge, encouraging people to raise as much as they could from a £10 note that
arrived in a pencil case with stationery and a paying in slip. Most recently, we ran an
integrated fund-raising and donating drive asking people to do ‘Just one thing’ to help make a
difference.
Employee engagement with the programme has contributed to a rise in our internal
‘Employee Promise Survey’ scores that look at advocacy and loyalty to Aviva as an employer;
in 2011, 78% of our people agreed that we do a good job of contributing to the communities in
which we live and work (compared to a score of 60% in 2010) and 80% of our people feel
Aviva’s commitment to corporate responsibility is genuine (compared to 71% in 2010).
Employee engagement with the programme is also vital for interaction with our customers.
To support this, we provided briefing packs to our frontline staff in case any questions were to
arise during a customer call - which was particularly important as we began introducing
donation incentives to a number of our products.
Engaging with consumers:
Our consumer research demonstrated an appetite to see Aviva making donations when
customers bought or renewed a policy with us - but there was no fixed amount that people
determined we should give. Therefore, in September 2010, we launched 11 test campaigns
to trigger donations between £5 and £50 from Aviva to Railway Children at the point of
sale/renewal. Through these we reached over 679,000 consumers and donated over
£77,000. The results indicated that there was a clear synergy between two products as we
saw increased conversion rates at the point of sale. The offers on these two hero products9
were rolled out in 2011 and have reached an additional 229,920 consumers to date, triggering
a further £70,000. Building on this, the home insurance incentive has been embedded into
our plans for 2012, with a goal of this continuing to expand across the business. One
customer said “I think it's great that Aviva want to help these children, and it's particularly
helpful if Aviva and Railway Children can persuade the Government to change their policy”
whilst another commented “It's an encouragement to your customers to know what you are
doing in the community.”
To build on the awareness we had started to create with our customers, we also wanted to
take the message to a wider audience. To do this, we knew we would need to create
something that would stand out from the more traditional Aviva marketing and so we
developed Street Dance for Change, a digital campaign that encouraged young people to
help other young people. By sharing a dance video created by dance group Diversity10, we
called upon young people to help us make a difference. The video contained messages
about young runaways and asked people to upload their own freestyle dance to win Diversity
tickets; Aviva donated £2 to Railway Children for every view of a competition entry and within
3 three days of the media launch, £100,000 had been reached. The campaign videos were
viewed over 350,000 times on YouTube, 100,000 Facebook polls were answered on the issue
of young runaways and the campaign received 82 pieces of media coverage – with over 38m
impressions delivered. We paired this activity with some hard-hitting awareness ads aimed at
an adult audience and as a result of this campaign, we saw a shift in Railway Children
prompted awareness from 5% to 6%; a great step for a relatively unknown charity11.
The Street Dance for Change campaign was swiftly followed by the announcement of Railway
Children’s first celebrity ambassador, Alexandra Burke; a relationship brokered by Aviva and
one which has since seen further coverage for Railway Children in the likes of the Huffington
Post12. Alexandra celebrated the opening of our new project in London and then attended the
Norwich City FC Community Match against Arsenal, at which we gave up our shirt
sponsorship to Railway Children – with televised coverage reaching 203 countries, this was a
huge opportunity for Railway Children’s brand and collectively, this activity delivered a media
reach of 221 million during 2011.
Conclusion:
Bringing together the size and scale of Aviva’s reach in the UK, with Railway Children’s
expertise, we have succeeded in starting to secure the attention of our customers, employees
and the wider public – but we believe there is so much more to achieve. As a testament to
this, we are delighted to have announced the extension of our partnership to the end of 2014.
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