Food Standards Agency (FSA) / Smarts
‘Speak Up For Allergies’: The FSA campaign that spoke volumes.
Details
‘Speak Up For Allergies’ is a Food Standards Agency (FSA) campaign that targets young people (18-21) living with food allergies and their friends and family. For this particular campaign, the aim was to encourage young people to speak to the restaurant/takeaway about their food allergy every single time they’re ordering food, even if it’s a restaurant they’ve been to before, or a meal they’ve had before. The campaign was heavily focused on takeaway, considering covid restrictions at the time, and Belfast Live was the right partner for reaching the target audience (TA).
Campaign idea
In response to the brief, we curated a series of content on Belfast Live, in various formats, that would 'speak volumes' to the target demographic and disrupt their social space in a fun and educational way.
Part I: news
First up, we covered the basics with a self-explanatory news article addressing the issue that young people need to speak up about allergies and the consequences of not doing so. This included helpful information such as ‘what is an allergen and how to recognise it'.
Part II: social
Next, Instagram - one of the most popular platforms with the younger generation - so it was important for us to utilise this channel. We wanted to disrupt the TA’s social space with a short, informative Instagram reel that would educate young people on the need to speak up about any potential allergies they or a friend might have. This was created and edited by our very own in-house team - and was Belfast Live's very first reel.
Part III: sponsored content
We then supplemented the campaign with more detailed news articles that homed in on staying takeaway safe. A Buzzfeed style tips article was written in a way that we know young people would digest and take on board - straight to the point and informative.
A case study interview with a graduate on her very own experience of having an allergy helped further cement the campaign messaging by telling a compelling story of someone the TA could relate to.
Part IV: the fun
We rounded off the campaign with a user-friendly Instagram quiz utilising the Instagram story Quiz functionality to test the knowledge of our readers on all things allergies.
All in all, we kept to the same story but just told it in different ways that would engage young people.
Results
> Total reach and impressions of all social media content across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter - 239.7k.
> Social media engagement rate - 7.4k.
> Articles viewed 3.2k times.
> Belfast Live’s first commercial Instagram reel!
Client feedback
Louise Owens, Senior Communications Executive said "Belfast Live created a suite of content to help us reach our target audience locally and spread the campaign key messages through native and social content. Their quiz performed brilliantly with 56.2k impressions and 4.3k engagements. We also exceeded our dwell time KPI for native content (24 seconds vs KPI of 13 seconds) which means people who clicked on the content engaged with it, staying on the page for longer than expected. Our client was really happy with the performance and would definitely look to include content from Belfast Live in future campaigns."