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Client
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Date delivered
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Marketing strategy Hero film Social cut downs
There’s a crisis in foster care in the UK. Thousands of children need somewhere to live, someone to look after them, but there just aren’t enough foster carers to help. Part of the problem is that the media tends to only report on the negative stories, but for every one of those you read there are literally hundreds of successes. Little Acorns, a foster care agency based in Suffolk, wanted to change that.
Fostering campaigns tend to look the same. Couples sat on sofas talking about their journey, or brand films complete with soft focus, lilting music, and a voiceover reminding you that fostering is rewarding. The team at Little Acorns wanted something more real, but with a high production value.
When they came to us, they had the kernel of an idea: a video conversation between a foster carer and foster child. The question they had was, could they do more? Rather than a fire and forget video, we proposed a full marketing campaign built around a single idea: that one adult can change the life of a child.
A campaign, not a one-off shoot
Quite often, video briefs sit alone. There’s already a campaign plan for them to sit inside, or it’s a simple matter of promotion post creation. This one started with a plan. Before we filmed anything, we built the strategy – a defined audience, a channel approach, and the numbers we'd measure success against.
Every marketing campaign is designed to gain attention for a brand’s product or service. For Little Acorns, the goal was recruitment. They needed more foster carers to support children across the East of England. Everything that followed, from the questions we asked on camera to the copy that ran beside the film, was built to reach them.
Our approach was to build a hero film featuring a foster carer and former foster child, now turned adult. We were lucky enough to be able to work with British para-athlete Bebe Jackson on this project, and she shared her experiences of care openly and honestly. The hero film would form the backbone of the full campaign – acting as source material for social cut downs, blogs, PR pitches, and supporting content.
Real people, handled with care
A fostering campaign lives or dies on trust, and trust doesn't come from a script. It comes from real people telling the truth about their lives. We sat down with Mick Davis, a Little Acorns foster carer, and let him talk – not in soundbites, but in the honest, unhurried way that makes an audience lean in.
Filming in this world carries a responsibility most productions never face. Every release, contract, and consent form was written to current UK law.
Alongside Mick was Bebe, with her story providing the most powerful threads in the campaign, and one of the most sensitive. Our photographer captured behind-the-scenes stills throughout, giving Little Acorns a library of campaign imagery to sit alongside the films.
One shoot. A whole campaign.
From a single production, we built out everything Little Acorns needed to launch. The approved hero film. Eight social cutdowns, each engineered for a specific moment in the feed. A four-part blog suite answering the questions real people ask before they ever enquire – the empty-nest years, the myths about who's allowed to foster, how fostering allowances actually work, and a first-person story. A launch news release. And a master social copy bank, timed across the campaign and grounded in verified UK fostering figures rather than vague reassurance.
We advised on the campaign landing page and its title – The Difference Is You – so the film, the words, and the call to action all landed in the same place on day one.
One shoot. A campaign's worth of assets. Which was the point. A fostering agency can't afford to shoot ten times a year, so we shot once and made it work everywhere.
Recruitment isn't about persuading people that fostering is easy. It's about helping the right person recognise themselves in the story. That’s the heart of a good campaign.
