1. Making change for care leavers The Children’s Society Jacq McNee & Andy Soar

2. What we will cover Overview of the campaign
Background
What we will cover
Overview of the campaign
Local digital campaigning using EN
Local targeting – Unitary, district and county mayhem
Offline tactics to support the campaign

3. Background
In 2015, our Wolf at the Door report found council tax was a particularly frightening experience for young people leaving the care system
Exempting care leavers from paying council tax until they turn 25 to give them a fairer start
Began to target local authorities in 2016
Our Wolf at the door report reveals that council tax debt can be a particularly frightening experience for care leavers.  What can start out for many care leavers as falling slightly behind can very quickly escalate to a court summons and enforcement action being taken.
A council tax exemption would give these young people a few years to learn how to live independently and get a fair start
Since 2015 we were calling for a council tax exemption for all young people leaving care to be included in the children and social work bill
We then made a decision to lobby councils
A small number of local authorities began to implement the policy and in December 2016we learnt that Hammersmith and Fulham were going to be the first London borough. We thought this would be a great opportunity to kick start our campaign.
We created a ‘Thank You’ action for supporters in H and F to thank their councillors for adopting the policy. We saw this as an opportunity to push other boroughs in London to also adopt the policy.

4. Local Authority Structure
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County council
Education
Social care
Local authorities in England have responsibility for different areas depending on the type of authority they are. Cities and large towns tend to be Unitary – where the council has responsibility for everything, whereas in more rural areas they run on a two tier system with the county council having strategic oversight for social care and education and district council are responsible for local services, including council tax.
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Unitary council
(201)
District council
Council tax
Local services

5. Local digital campaigning
Background
Local digital campaigning
Number of care leavers in each local authority for both Councillors and Campaigners!
Database for unitary and district councils
Redirects to thank you action
We wanted to make the issue tangible for people taking the action and for councillors receiving s. This meant having the number of care leavers both in the reference data and in our supporter data. To do this, we wanted them to see the number of care leavers in their area. Data on the number of care leavers is only collected at the upper tier level and so we had to shape the action around that. So the to target had the number of care leavers in upper tier local authorities as did the second page of the action above the .
We initially built the action on the standard unitary / district database – as we were only targeting London, GM and West Midlands, which are all unitary. We created redirects for every council which had adopted the policy.

6. Numbers of care leavers on action and email
We wanted both the Councillor and campaigner to see the number of care leavers. It wasn’t easy. We had to use java script to pull the number of care leavers in an area when someone put their postcode in – this was done through uploading csv files to ‘personalisation data’.

7. Using reference data​ -
We used reference data to enable us to localise the data in the to the target. We needed the name of the council and number of care leavers for each upper-tier local authority.
In order to get the reference data we had to create spreadsheet which had all the corresponding information and then EN were able to upload this to the reference database. -

8. Redirects – phase 1 Our actions:
EN enabled us to redirect supporters to a thank you action if their council had already made the exemption
Thank you enabled us to engage supporters who don't normally campaign

9. Local targeting: it’s tricky
Campaign started to grow organically
Excluding regions – meant need for a ‘region redirect’ action
Needed to create a new database for unitary and two-tier local authorities
Initially only targeted specific regions where we knew at least one LA was already going to make this change. Helped build local pressure and made it relevant to supporters. – London, West Midlands and Manchester
By July councils signed up
As momentum built and the campaign was being shared organically we realised we needed to exclude Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. We also needed to ensure we were targeting county councils in two tier areas so that we were targeting decision makers who have strategic oversight of children’s services.  This was problematic because the databases available on EN were either Unitary/District OR County – and we needed unitary AND county.
This meant creating a whole new database and uploading it. When people put in their postcode they…XXXXXX

10. A brave new page building world
No longer needed separate region redirect action
Introduction of page builder enabled us to tailor s to specific councils 
The numbers of care leavers in certain areas stopped pulling through for campaigners – so we had to alter the javascript
We also started including a redirect for counties who had supported the exemption so that they received a thank you and the district received a lobbying
We started using Page Builder in July With Page builder, we stopped needing a region redirect action.
Page builder enabled us to tailor our letters for specific councils e.g. where all but one council had exempted care leavers in a specific region. However, page builder did bring problems.
When we migrated to page builder there was a 50 line limit in the code block – so the javascript pulling through the numbers of care leavers from personalisation data stopped working as there are 154 councils. So we had to save as a java script file, upload and then put the link to it in the code block – Corin helped with this This has now been saved to our library meaning we can use it across different actions
After we had been using page builder for a while we started to get announcements from county councils in support of the campaign. If you’ll remember from the flowchart county councils have strategic oversight of children's services, but it’s the districts who are responsible for council tax, so we set up a new action that enabled supporters to thank their county council that then redirected them automatically to lobby their district council

11. Our targeting!
Page Builder helped… but it was still quite complicated!
As you can see, despite it being a fairly simple concept – councils in England who can decide whether to exempt care leavers from council tax or not – it turned into an incredibly complex redirect and filter.
Redirecting anyone in Scotland, N.Ireland and Wales to a holding page
Redirecting any councils who have implemented the policy to a thank you action
The redirect only allows up to 50, so we then had to start again
County councils need to work with their district council for the exemption to happen so we also created an action that enabled us to thank the county council for supporting the campaign, which then redirected the supporter to an targeting their district councillor
Whilst this looks confusing in the old legacy tools we needed to have 5 separate actions set up for all of these redirects, which was more confusing and open to human error.

12. Because things had become too easy
We’d hit 60 councils – most had been contacted, but were the right people getting the message?
New targets - Member for Finance and Member for Children’s Services
Created a new database to enable us to target them
By January momentum was building, we’d hit 60 councils, but we wanted to try targeting the key member of each council who held the purse strings, as well as the key member for children’s services who ultimately has responsibility for young people leaving care – so we targeted the lead member for finance and the lead member for children. We also knew that councils would be setting budgets for the coming financial year, so it was a good time to try a new approach
Obviously these details would not be on EN In order to create the new database we needed to download the contact database from EN and input the details for each lead member of finance and children’s services. (Corin sent us the search ID for each council ward) and we then manually input the name and address for the councillor.
This took a long time
We only input Local authorities with no local elections in May,
Then we had to search each council website for contact details – this was more difficult than you might think as not all council websites have clear contact information for councillors.
Then we had to manually input the data into the template doc
And finally vlook up each search ID for each council twice (for finance and CYP lead)
This was then uploaded to EN as two contact databases so that we were able to the lead member for finance and copy in the lead member for children.

13. Campaign tactics…​
As this was not the main campaign we were running and we couldn’t contact all of our supporters about it, we had to think of inventive ways to push the campaign.
Young people met with the Children’s Minister
Short video for facebook and twitter interviewing a young person who’s left care, talking about the impact this exemption would have on them
Podcast briefing which supporters sent to their councillors via EN – really positive response from campaigners and decision makers -

14. Campaign tactics …
We went to care leavers conference talking to young people about the campaign
We created an interactive map where supporters could see whether or not their council had implemented the policy,
We thanked each and every council on twitter and sent them a press release.
We also had a young person with experience of the care system champion the campaign in his local authority, and when they made the exemption he wrote an to our supporters in his area to let them know and ask them to thank their councillors.
We created a whole load of offline resources to support supporters who wanted to take the campaign offline and had supporters going to council meetings to raise the issue, and another supporter spoke to their local mayor.
Through all of this every local authority in the country except one has received a letter from our campaigners which is absolutely fantastic.

15. Learnings Ongoing campaign – ref data is constantly changing
There are thousands of councillors in the country, so whenever there is a by-election, caused by a councillor resigning, or dying etc it knocks the ref data out of sync and we have to once again upload the database to EN. This would then mean that the reference data wouldn’t show in the s, so if we didn’t pick up on it quickly our targets would be getting s with blanks in. This has meant testing the action regularly and we are working with EN to find a more convenient method for checking up on this and updating it.
The thank you action has enabled us to engage with supporters who wouldn’t normally campaign and has been well received by our targets. It’s an easy to understand ask for people who might not otherwise campaign.
There has been a lot of behind the scenes activity to get this action live, and has made the process quite complex.
Campaign has been incredibly successful and this has been made possible through our proactive approach and the support we have received from engaging networks to come up with workarounds and solutions to the problems we identified
Ongoing campaign – ref data is constantly changing 
Thank you action really good engagement for new campaigners/existing non campaigning supporters
Lots of behind the scenes activity and process to make the action work
Campaign success been made possible through working closely with Engaging Networks

16. Background 68
68 councils, and over 4000 letters sent and we’re hoping we’ll have reached 77 (over half by Easter.) expecting announcements soon!

17. Contact us Jacq.mcnee@childrenssociety.org.uk
There are thousands of councillors in the country, so whenever there is a by-election, caused by a councillor resigning, or dying etc it knocks the ref data out of sync and we have to once again upload the database to EN. This would then mean that the reference data wouldn’t show in the s, so if we didn’t pick up on it quickly our targets would be getting s with blanks in. This has meant testing the action regularly and we are working with EN to find a more convenient method for checking up on this and updating it.
The thank you action has enabled us to engage with supporters who wouldn’t normally campaign and has been well received by our targets. It’s an easy to understand ask for people who might not otherwise campaign.
There has been a lot of behind the scenes activity to get this action live, and has made the process quite complex.
Campaign has been incredibly successful and this has been made possible through our proactive approach and the support we have received from engaging networks to come up with workarounds and solutions to the problems we identified