A brighter future for homeless men – The Michael Project, Mission Australia

The Michael Project is an inspiring new program designed by Mission Australia to provide support to homeless men, taking them out of the confines of isolation which are rife in the world of homelessness.

The final report for the project was launched on 17 April 2012, with attendees taken through the results of the research by Professor Paul Flatau, Chair in Social Investment and Impact and Director of the Centre for Social Impact at the University of Western Australia. They were also treated with special guest presenter Dr Dennis Culhane, Chair of Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Michael Project was created with homeless men in the centre, using a range of services to ensure their quality of life was improved across as many areas as possible over the course of the 12 month program. The key was building on existing services to extend the range of support.

Mission Australia was able to demonstrate that the program could effectively save Australian taxpayers as much as $3,061 per participant.

The following three points were the focus of the project, and the reasons for its success.

• Providing temporary accommodation – leading to more long-term housing
• Providing specialist support service access – this helped to increase many of the men’s ability to earn an income and be more involved at a social level
• Providing one-to-one support from a case worker, assigned at the beginning of the project

Ogilvy Impact partnered with Mission Australia to produce a short video, bringing to life a developed infographic, for the launch of the project and to visually summarise the 69-page report. The video has been embedded into the Mission Australia page and has resulted in over 700 views, an excellent result in terms of awareness of the project and the work that Mission Australia does.

http://www.missionaustralia.com.au/research-and-social-policy/3153-the-michael-project

Nestlé Australia: Achieving Olympic sized sales effort

Challenge

With growing consumer demand for low pricing, greater competition from supermarket ‘own brand’ products and a massive rise in cost base, 2008 would bring a number of challenges to the Nestlé Sales team. The employee engagement challenge was significant. How to drive greater effort from an already stretched and high-performing team with the ultimate aim of maximising sales.

Insight

Insights gain from the merchandiser research revealed head office was seen as an ‘ivory tower’ which lacked understanding of the needs and challenges merchandisers faced in their roles.

Campaign

Impact’s strategy included research, a series of engagement events and ongoing momentum activities whilst capitalising on Nestlé’s sponsorship of the Australian Olympic Swim Team. Strong messaging encouraged employees to challenge their own limits, resulting in the creation of the ‘Personal Best’ (PB) brand. The PB brand was launched via an Olympic-themed roadshow. To ensure message retention, divisional messages were delivered via interactive team games with a quiz element to test recall and create a sense of competition.

Outcome

As described by Nestlé’s National Sales Director, “The Roadshow and comms strategy more than delivered what it set out to achieve…some say this is one of the hardest challenges to overcome, motivating a team who are already at the top of their game. The balance of strong message direction, creativity and experiential communication has meant our team is motivated and inspired to step up their pace and deliver an even higher performance in 2008.”

http://www.impact.com.au

Lion Nathan: Making Our Mark

Challenge

To engage, inspire and invigorate the 500-strong Lion Nathan team at the national sales and marketing conference to deliver on an ambitious year ahead.

Insight

Communicating a stretch target for an already successful sales and marketing team would not be enough – Lion Nathan’s call to arms had to be bolstered with strong support from aligned leadership, and the presentation of business initiatives that would be real enablers to delivery.

Campaign

Impact Employee Communications, Ogilvy PR’s employee communications specialists, worked with Lion Nathan leadership and tapped into employee insights to develop a strategic theme for the conference – ‘Making Our Mark’ – executed via a powerful visual identity.
A coordinated campaign was devised around the theme, with pre-event awareness and excitement achieved through an email countdown campaign, and at the conference through energetic video, keynote speaker presentation support and execution, highly visual participant workbooks (to ensure the team had a personal record of learnings and action plans), and themed room décor and collateral with on-message slogans.

Outcome

The ‘Making Our Mark’ campaign was met with roaring success – the client cited it as achieving cut-through in its conference-heavy calendar, and has become the umbrella theme for all sales and marketing initiatives for the year.

http://www.impact.com.au