CHILDCARE - A JOB FOR THE BOYS

Just two per cent of the childcare workforce is male. To help the Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) tackle this imbalance, Band & Brown developed a campaign championing the role of men in the early years sector – which more than punched its weight against no less an historic story as Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration.
With careers in nurseries simply not on men’s radars, we needed to achieve real media cut-through for the issue, shine the spotlight on men already working in the sector to reveal the rewards and enjoyability of the job – and also offer crucial reassurance that men are wanted in nurseries. The campaign certainly did the trick.
We commissioned research that revealed that many parents – and lone mothers in particular – wanted to see more men working with nursery-aged children because of the benefits they bring. The resulting news story received widespread broadcast coverage, appearing on The Today Programme, Wake Up to Wogan, BBC Breakfast, GMTV, The Jeremy Vine Show, BBC News 24, BBC One O’Clock News and Five News, as well as a wide range of regional television and radio stations. It was also covered in The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express and TES, with Times journalist Hugo Rifkind shadowing two male early years workers for an in-depth feature in T2, timed to land on the day of launch. The story has gone on to have a life in sector press, a secondary audience, through a series of Band & Brown-penned thought-leadership pieces.
In total, more than 150 pieces of coverage were generated, resulting in over 89 million opportunities to see. The combined editorial value of £1.9 million was a return on investment of more than 200:1. No less importantly, there was also a 13 per cent lift in hits to CWDC’s website and a 30 per cent increase in call volumes to its recruitment hotline.