This article is not part of our Catalyst Programme, but we are looking to use this blog to talk about other projects and innovations we are working on here at Citizens Advice North East Derbyshire.
What's "What's Up?"
Well, one thing it isn't, is a new idea.
2003: The website
Way back in 2003, we set up our first "Youth Advice" website with tailored information, links and activities for younger people. As it was relatively early days for the internet (three years before Facebook went global, or Twitter made its first Tweet) our promotion was very much analogue, using plastic "credit cards" to advertise the site at local events and libraries. We even got Chesterfield Football Club involved whose players gave their backing to an anti-bullying campaign.
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| The original "Youth Advice" website |
Over the years, we eventually decided to consolidate all of our information back into our main website as we didn't have the time or resources to do the "Youth Advice" website justice, but it had proven popular with a large number of visitors over its lifetime.
2016: The college project
Fast-forward to 2016 and we had the opportunity to speak to some students at Chesterfield College. They had contacted us to work on a short two-week project where we would go in and talk to the class about who we were and what we do, and then the next week they would present back to us their ideas on how they would like us to promote our services to younger people and how they would like to access advice.
This was only a year after the national Citizens Advice rebrand so it was interesting to hear from the students that they had little to no knowledge of Citizens Advice, and that the current brand was not something that would attract them to our service.
We have a full report available on our findings from the sessions, but one thing that came through loud and clear was that a different brand or way of promoting Citizens Advice was needed in order to reach younger people.
Armed with this information, we did start looking at a new brand which we settled on calling "Advice Squad".
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| A selection of some of our "Advice Squad" poster ideas |
It seemed a good idea to us, but we were creating this in a bubble with no input from younger people. As the college project was only a short-term thing, we had no access to a focus group of those whose opinion really mattered. We didn't want to commit the cardinal sin of trying to connect to young people when we were no longer young people ourselves.
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| There really is nothing worse than trying to connect to younger people and horribly misjudging it. |
2020: The pandemic
As we all know too well, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world, and while we had to close our doors for face-to-face advice, we increased our hours and coverage for telephone and webchat advice. We needed to make sure people knew we were still there for them (albeit through different channels) and one idea for this was to increase our social media presence.
We had used social media for some time, being early adopters of both Facebook and Twitter, but some of the newer platforms had passed us by. We advertised for new Social Media Volunteers to guide us through these new platforms and bring in new ideas. As it was a remote working role, we had a high number of applications from further afield than we would normally attract volunteers. The other big difference in demographic for this role was that they were younger people, so once we increased our output for our usual channels (and also added an Instagram account, YouTube channel and podcast) we once again looked at how we could better connect with younger people.
Our new volunteers had similar opinions to those raised by the students a few years earlier, the Citizens Advice brand wasn't something they were overly aware of, or something that would grab their attention. We started looking at new ways of promoting advice to younger people at the end of 2020 with the aim to launch something in the new year.
Through a connection with one of our volunteer advisers, we were lucky enough to get a consultation with Rasha at Social Jaguar, a marketing strategist whose input helped us finally agree on a name and then a logo for the new brand.
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| Early on in the process, we identified "something" up as a strong brand that could be housed in an arrow logo. |
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| After settling on "What's Up?" as a name, we then refined the logo |
We were now in a position where we had a new social media brand for youth advice, mainly run by younger volunteers who were posting about the advice topics they were interesting in a way that they would engage with. Although "What's Up?" doesn't use the Citizens Advice branding, we still mention Citizens Advice, link back to Citizens Advice and promote the contact details of Citizens Advice. The main aim of "What's Up?" is to raise awareness of the kind of things that younger people might want to access Citizens Advice services for, but still with a fresher look and coming from their peers rather than risking talking down to younger people or missing the mark completely.
As with any new brands or channels, take up was slow (although it is noticeably more popular on Instagram - a channel we had only just started utilising for our main local office social media). We needed a hook, or a way to get more eyes on What's Up? (and in turn, Citizens Advice itself).
We needed... a hashtag.
2021: The hashtag
We'd had the idea for a while, but now we had our new brand starting to get established and a team of enthusiastic volunteers, 2021 seemed the perfect time to launch our awareness campaign #advicechallenge
Advice Challenge asks two questions:
What's the best advice you ever had?
What advice do you wish you'd had at a younger age?
Then asks people to post their replies (ideally in video format, but an image or just text is fine too) to either Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #advicechallenge and then tag in three other people to take up the challenge.
The idea is that people can answer absolutely anything, whether serious or funny, but as long as they get talking about the concept of "advice" and link back to either "What's Up?" or a Citizens Advice social media channel (ideally both).
The links to the What's Up? channels are:
This is just one way to get people talking about advice and hopefully finding out more about what we offer as a service. Although it does stray from the current brand, it does seem that brand isn't attractive enough to a younger audience. We won't know whether "What's Up?" bridges that divide or not until we try it, but we thought it worth a shot!
If you'd like to help us, then please post an #advicechallenge of your own and let us know about it at whatsup@nedcab.org.uk
