How do you create a message with real feeling?

We were asked to show the real Mencap

Mencap fight every day to create an equal world for people with a learning disability. They celebrate people. They’re respected and influential. Their work is demanding, and their people find it uniquely rewarding.

And they wanted an employer brand that said all of this and more.

We soon got a feel for things

The more people we spoke to, the clearer it became that working at Mencap meant a lot to them. They felt determined, resolute and inspired. Sometimes elated and sometimes frustrated. But always proud of what they made possible and the difference they were making. The sheer range and depth of emotion that people felt was remarkable, and it showed the reality of life at Mencap. So we put it at the heart of the employer brand.

Work with feeling

The new employer brand is emotive without being sombre or confrontational.

We’re inspiring and intriguing rather than tugging at heart strings. The black and white imagery is powerful, but hits of colour stop it from getting too serious.

And our headlines explore the full range of ‘feeling’ that working at Mencap can give.

For example, here are a few ads that bring out just some of the ‘feelings’ we encountered during our research. They feature a mix of employees and the people they support, to give the full picture.

We suggested running this approach across some outdoor print and minibrochures too.

Looking internally, we suggested supporting the theme by getting Mencap’s employees to contribute suggestions to four mood-themed playlists.

The resulting playlists would be open to all, to help them celebrate the good times and cope better with their more challenging days.

Postcards showing Mencap’s values to sit at employees’ desks.

They can pick a handful up and take them to meetings or simply hand them out when needed (for example at an event).

Lanyards can be tagged using NFC (Near Field Communication) to share and transfer information – things like video and content that explain and illustrate the values.

Of course, we had the web in mind too. The employer brand has been brought into the careers pages of the Mencap site, along with our newly created videos.

We also suggested a teaser campaign to launch it all, that let the emotive power of our employer brand photography do the talking for us.

And finally, this was a little idea for a giveaway.

It showed that the brand could ‘give’ people feelings as well as talk about them.

Results

It’ll take at least a year before we can assess properly whether or not our work has made an impact on retention. But in terms of attraction, we’ve made a big impression.

In the first three months of the campaign, our programmatic and paid search campaigns delivered:

• 4,873,586 impressions
• 33,300 clicks
• 3,066 application starts
• 872 application completions

We also ran a one-month TrueView campaign on YouTube to launch the new employer brand, showcasing a selection of videos we produced as part of the project. This delivered:

• 161,778 impressions
• 36,185 video views
• 156 clicks