Our workHeadway ABI Week 2025 / Their strongest performing awareness campaign
Action for Brain Injury Week (ABI Week) is Headway’s annual initiative to raise awareness and understanding of brain injury.
After working on their 2023 campaign, we were delighted to partner with them again for ABI Week 2025 – which turned out to be the charity’s best-performing ABI Week campaign ever.
17,800+ combined social engagement
125,000+ total video views
620,000+ combined social reach
The power of telling authentic stories
Helping Headway improve lives
Headway is a UK-wide charity that works to improve life after brain injury. Every year, around 350,000 people are admitted to hospital with an acquired brain injury – that's one every 90 seconds. And the impact can be devastating, life-changing, and life-long.
But symptoms can change day to day, hour to hour, and it’s all too easy to judge a brain injury survivor on their good days, without making any allowances for their bad.
On a good day…
Our challenge was to raise awareness of the fluctuating and unpredictable nature of symptoms. So, for this campaign we told both sides of the story, of what it’s like living with a brain injury – from the little wins of doing ordinary things to the real challenges they face.
By dialling up the contrast between good days and bad days, we gave people a window into the lives of those living with brain injury.
Our creative approach combined authentic user-generated content for videos, social, in-branch posters and a comprehensive campaign toolkit. We captured real stories, showing the often heartbreaking struggles and frustrations of living with a brain injury, and how it affects their relationships with those around them.
Reaching the right audiences
We had to consider a number of different audiences for this campaign – from those close to the survivors to those in positions of power, who can sometimes make decisions that inadvertently make like harder for those with a brain injury.
Headway want to encourage friends and family to be more patient and understanding on the days when focus or patience is in short supply and plans are cancelled last minute because the world is too much to deal with. And to be there for them – on the good days and the bad.
They’d like employers to be more aware of how symptoms can fluctuate, in order to be flexible and make additional allowances for employees with a brain injury.
And they want benefit assessors and decision makers to see the bigger picture and appreciate that if a brain injury survivor is assessed on a ‘good day’, a bad day is only ever just around the corner.
A good day for results
Our ‘good day’ campaign delivered the highest reach of any ABI Week campaign, with over 620,000 impressions. It was also their most-watched ABI Week campaign, with more than 125,000 video views.
But the impact went further. We reached harder-to-engage audiences. Maximus, an organisation that conducts work capability assessments on behalf of the DWP, included our campaign in their internal communications, sharing it with both clinical and non-clinical staff – a huge win for Headway.
The campaign also opened doors in Parliament. Two brain injury survivors, Lorna and Warren, spoke to MPs at the House of Commons during the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on acquired brain injury, chaired by Sir John Hayes. There was further recognition through an Early Day Motion (EDM), mentioning ABI Week across all devolved nations.
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