Have you ever received an email with a subject line saying something like;

‘Do you use Google Ad Words?’ 

or 

‘What’s your marketing strategy?’, 

And you look to delete them almost immediately as someone obviously has your email address and is sending you cold marketing emails?

Well on 9th October Outlandish received an email with the subject line,

“Ad Vans!”

We went to delete it, just before realising that the sender was a collaborator on the Stop School Cuts campaign, at Small Axe. The first line of the email, read as follows,

“I’m just writing with a bit of an off the wall request for you.”

And indeed it was, the ask was, could Outlandish build a dynamic screen for a Ad Vans driving to the Houses of Parliament in two weeks! The Ad Vans would be delivering messages from parents and teachers about the State of Schools in England, pulling changing comments in from an Airtable.

Quick internal discussions took place, in theory, Yes. In practice, who could we fit the work in with? What are the risks?  What do we need and when?  (designs and the data yesterday)

After juggling projects, tweaking designs, again, oh and again… we got there and this is what happened..

The Campaign on the streets…literally

The School Cuts team ran six ad-vans in Westminster over 3 days in the lead-up to the Budget between 23rd October and the 30th October, 

The vans featured over 1,000 dynamic comments from parents and teachers across England about the state of schools and why they were calling for school funding to be completely restored. 

The Tech

From a technical point of view, one of the most interesting things about this mini-project was that we controlled everything for the Ad Vans from within the schoolcuts.org.uk WordPress website. We added a new Gutenberg block with configuration options for cycle speed, number of parents and Airtable source, allowing the team to tweak the ad or add different versions without our help. The hardest part was styling the ad in a way that accommodated all the varied comments; making them as big as possible without overflowing the screen – so it didn’t help that the ad van company provided a different sized screen the day before they started…such is the nature of live campaigning!

And The Budget..

Sadly, the budget did not include the additional £1 billion required for SEN so the campaigning continues and we are proud to be supporting the NEU in their campaign to Stop the School Cuts.