As communicators, we know the power that truly effective awareness campaigns can have. Not only can they help people to understand what you as a charity do but they can also inspire action and empower others.
At Reset we support a fantastic scheme – Community Sponsorship – a refugee resettlement programme which increases refugee welcome – and what we wanted was to grow the awareness of it.
Knowing that an honest, nuanced and respectful chat about welcoming refugees is best done through face-to-face conversation we started a three-month long campaign called ‘CommuniTeas’. A campaign asking people to put on a tea party to get their local community together and explore what refugee welcome looks like to them with the aim of helping break down barriers and allow people to take ownership of their own communities’ narrative on refugees.
Here’s how we’ve gone about it…
Spotting an opportunity to increase awareness and support
The Community Sponsorship scheme that our charity supports was set up following the outpouring of support for refugees in 2015 in response to the war in Syria. The scheme is community-led and people come together to plan how they could support a refugee family within their town, village or city long-term (usually over 1-2 years). It takes painstaking and thoughtful planning, plus time for the refugee family to arrive, so it can take years, but nearly 1000 refugees have been welcomed this way.
Then in 2022, the government opened another scheme – the Homes for Ukraine scheme in response to the war in Ukraine. Unlike Community Sponsorship, this scheme requires people to open their homes to refugees – but only for six months. From the point of introduction through our matching scheme and the refugee arriving can be a matter of weeks so it’s much quicker and over 100,000 people have been welcomed since the launch. This success clearly shows there is a growing network of people who are keen to make a tangible difference to their community and refugees.
Alongside this, we’ve also noticed that the evolution of these schemes has consistently changed what refugee welcome looks like in the UK and allowed individuals to have direct impacts on their communities. But we have had to consistently adapt our approach to comms and campaigning, as the audience and political landscape changes. So, now with two schemes with two different audiences both with differing reasons for getting involved in refugee welcome; how do we get more people interested in both?
We wanted to create space for conversations that would facilitate people’s ability to go on a journey of refugee welcome. Encouraging those who have hosted someone for six months, to then continue being active in the refugee sector and perhaps join a Community Sponsorship group. And so, the beginnings of CommuniTea was born.
Bringing a campaign about community to life
Polling showed us that 70% of the UK public feel it’s important for refugees to be able to integrate into their communities but it also showed that 55% of people have not heard of Community Sponsorship.
Based on a large portion of our Community Sponsorship audience being founded in faith organisations, or friends chatting, we knew that the best way to increase awareness of this scheme was through word of mouth. We also knew that based on our research of our previous campaign, Communities for Refugees, that active participation was essential to any new campaign (it takes 17-18 people at a webinar and a follow-up call for every person who will start a Community Sponsorship group.) That’s why we looked at other campaigns that rely on word of mouth, and conversations being central to their approach – and Macmillan Coffee Mornings jumped out.
We wanted to replicate the idea of bringing people together over tea or coffee and creating a friendly, open space for people to come together and discuss welcoming refugees.
We looked at what other campaigns were out there, and we came up with the idea of getting people to put on tea parties. The function of the tea parties is multipurpose. For example; could a Community Sponsorship group use it to celebrate the current stage of the application? Could an individual who wants to start a new group but doesn’t know where to start use it to bring people together? Or is there a hub for Ukrainian welcome that want to have a celebratory tea and could use a tea party to allow space to talk about Community Sponsorship?
We created a pack outlining how people can be ‘representatives’ in their areas. These packs were emailed out to people we knew already working in community welcome. We then offered out posters, leaflets and reimbursement for tea and cake. The accessibility of the campaign was crucial. It had to have funding that directly supported communities, so they could take ownership of the welcome they would work to provide. Offering out a bit of money to support tea and cake is a great way to start spreading the word of a campaign – you get the interest of many local community centres, groups and organisations.
Empowering people to be a part of our campaign of welcome
Since launching the campaign and inviting people to host their own events, we have seen tea parties put on for a multitude of reasons but with the core principle that they are about creating a welcoming space for refugees. We have let communities feel empowered to take on the campaign and use it in a way that works for them.
In the branding element of the campaign, we moved away from using the word ‘refugees’ in the name of the campaign. It remains in the tagline, but as the conversation and movement of refugee welcome changes, we wanted this campaign to be accessible to those who may not join in a tea party if it had the word refugee in the title. We have worked with organisations who aren’t in the refugee sector traditionally (Mind, Eden Communities) and we felt that if we wanted to create an accessible and successful campaign, we needed it to be flexible to align with other requirements. We only ask that others running tea parties have space to have a conversation about refugee welcome at some point throughout the event.
January has been our outreach month. Getting people interested and excited about the campaign and committing to tea parties. February is when we are hoping most of the local tea parties take place. And March is our final tea parties and a celebratory month, ending on Nowruz, the Persian New Year, as we see whether these tea parties have created new Community Sponsorship groups and new connections.
We wanted to show that the polling of 70% of people being welcoming to refugees is really true, and now we have a fantastic campaign of action to prove it.
Read how charities are tackling some of the biggest issues of our time on our dedicated social issues hub.
Further reading:
- Framing matters: Refugees and their struggle for safety
- The importance of the ‘power of welcome’ in countering negative refugee narratives
Banner Image: carolyn christine on Unsplash
