Embedded Files
At the beginning of 2024, Flo launched 'Flo for Partners', a new mode where female users could share their health data with their male partners. This required MVP video content that could be created quickly and simply. Working with the Head of Video and Visual Lead, we came up with a new franchise designed to deliver clear, sex- and health-related information in under a minute. These responded directly to user research that showed we needed to tackle gaps in basic sex education and support users at key moments – from conception to pregnancy.
Each video featured a subject matter expert covering a single topic in 60 seconds, from ‘What is the menstrual cycle?’ to ‘How does conception happen?’ I used insights from both audience data and medical consultation to identify and prioritise topics, then wrote five video briefs, storyboards and scripts, supported live shoots remotely (via Zoom), and offered on-the-spot help with pronunciation and phrasing.
The results speak for themselves: an average 100% completion rate across the series, and the menstrual cycle video alone attracted almost 3,000 paid trials during the first 30 days of launch. This is clear proof that when you make essential health info simple, short and human, people engage.
After launching Scouts’ first new age group for 36 years, Squirrels (you can read more about the work under Brand and tone of voice), we realised we needed an introductory video.
I wanted this to be like the iconic Disneyworld video, helping to drum up children's excitement before they start with a group. It would explain what Squirrels was and help to ease anxious children’s (or parents’) minds by letting them know what to expect.
I wrote the script and produced this film in collaboration with Young animation studio. It uses a range of techniques including claymation and finger puppets, purposely hinting at some of the activities children can expect to do with Squirrel Scouts.
Good for You was a campaign that put the personal benefits of volunteering with Scouts front and centre. You can learn more about the campaign strategy and its results on the Campaigns page.
This film was made in collaboration with award-winning production company, 3angrymen. In line with the strategy and inspired by the nation’s love of Gogglebox, I wanted to reflect the incredibly diversity of Scouts volunteers. By casting people of all different ages, genders, ethnicities and backgrounds from across the UK, I hoped that everyone could find a leader they could relate to. I also wanted to create a warm, authentic and funny feel – there’s a perception that Scouts is strict and formal, so it was important not to have scripts but to ask people to speak honestly about why they love volunteering with Scouts. Having great conversations and asking the right questions was key.
The logistics of this film were a real challenge. It was important that we represented our volunteers in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales (including some Welsh language), but we had a limited budget. We found two groups in each country that were close enough so we could film both in one day (even if this meant running from North West London to South East London in a rainstorm, or from Edinburgh to Glasgow in an afternoon!). We did all of our pre-film meetings via Zoom so we could chemistry test and prepare volunteers without running up additional costs, and we kept the crew small – this also helped the volunteers to relax. Each of the interviews included questions that covered multiple content opportunities, so we also ended up with 13 hours of footage – this enabled us to create other #GoodForYou films throughout the campaign, without further shoots.
As a final touch, we asked animator Geth Vaughan and illustrator Joanna Muñoz to work together on animated overlays. These added extra humour to the film and tied in with the look of the Good for You campaign.
The response to the film was hugely positive. In the first few months, over 3,000 volunteers joined Scouts through #GoodForYou.
Produced in collaboration with French film studio Temple Caché and directed by Gwendoline Gamboa, ‘Even apart, we’re together’ was a beautifully bright testament to the power of togetherness, positivity and resilience, even in the face of a global pandemic. The film gave a peek into a diverse array of Scouts young people and volunteers as they Zoomed with nursing home residents, turned a Christmas angel into inspirational astronaut Major Tim Peake, and camped in gardens, bathtubs and under kitchen tables.
The film’s playful, Christmassy and irresistibly ear worm-y music was composed by Geth Vaughan, founder and director of Young Studio.
It reached 39,000 people on Facebook and had an engagement rate of 13%.
Starring most of Scouts’ celebrity Ambassadors including Bear Grylls, Steve Backshall, Ellie Simmonds and Helen Glover, ’Scouts made me’ was commissioned for Scouts’ 2020 AGM.
Working with production company 3angrymen, we came up with a script for each individual Ambassador detailing their amazing life journeys and how Scouts made them who they are today. The final film took elements from each of these, building to show the huge range of skills and values that Scouts helps people to develop. My work on this included script editing beforehand and acting as script doctor on the shoot.
The film made 568,688 impressions and had over 20,000 engagements, with a completion rate of 22% compared to our average of 5%. On Twitter alone, the post made 129,482 impressions compared to an average of 11,000. It won Gold at the Charity Film Awards 2022 and was a finalist in the Brand Communication category at the EVCOM Clarion Awards 2021.
At the beginning of 2019, Scouts started building a free database of digital activities for volunteers, parents/carers, and young people. Eighteen months on, nearly 1,000 activities have been delivered to agile sprints, with the Creative team being responsible for re-writing the activities in Scouts’ tone of voice and delivering media assets to accompany them. These assets couldn’t be purely decorational; they needed to help everyone understand the activity while also being entertaining (but not irritating – as adults might have to watch the videos multiple times!). They also had to work on social.
After consuming vast amounts of YouTube videos, we put together an in-depth outline of what we wanted to do.
This project was a close collaboration and involved travelling between Manchester and Cheshire to work with Follow Films and Young animation studio. We were committed to casting a diverse range of young people for the project (including those with differing abilities to show how activities could be adapted to be more inclusive), and wanted to maintain a balance between high quality, professional content and making the activities feel fun, informal, and easy to copy. With Follow Films, we produced 17 presenter-led videos and 14 tabletop how-to videos. With Young, we created a cast of characters and a world for them to live in, and overlaid the real-world videos with them to add greater clarity and colour. We also created 36 animated gifs and a whopping 320 illustrated scenes. All of this was to budget and to deadline.
These activities have exceeded expectations. Those with media assets have attracted 840,000 page views (around 33% more than those without assets) so far from 565,000 users, with 300,000 people returning repeatedly. Senior staff and volunteers on the project board fed back that the films delivered ‘above and beyond our wildest dreams’. The illustrations and animations were also Highly Recommended in the Design Week Awards 2020.
In Spring 2019, Scouts started a pilot programme for four and five year olds. To explain to members why we were doing this, a volunteer on the project wrote a paper on the scientific evidence behind early intervention. We wanted to get this information across in an easy to understand way, so I took the challenge of condensing and simplifying the paper into a script and worked with Young to turn it into this short animation. It ended up being one of my favourite pieces of work – not least because of the incredible original music that Young added and the work of the talented young voiceover artist, a local Scout.
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