our workNational Poetry Day / Helping young imaginations spark and bloom
Poetry can help young children engage with literacy and channel their emotions, yet one in five schools don’t include it as a significant part of the curriculum*. We worked with the Forward Arts Foundation to inspire more teachers to take part in National Poetry Day – and increased downloads of classroom resources by an incredible 83%.
Rhyme and reason
Research shows that poetry provides an outlet for creativity and is associated with positive literacy behaviours, especially among children in lower socioeconomic communities.
Teachers, unsurprisingly, want to teach more of it in schools – but because they either lack the time or confidence to incorporate it into the classroom, this isn’t happening. Overcoming those barriers, particularly in underprivileged areas, was the challenge we were set by our client, the Forward Arts Foundation – the brilliant team behind the annual National Poetry Day event.
Strategically staged
To inspire teachers, you need to reach teachers. We engaged with influencers and partners, and planned and delivered an organic and paid social campaign in education spaces, to raise awareness of National Poetry Day, poetry’s classroom benefits and the availability of classroom materials.
Our messaging focused on how the resources on the client’s website were free, ready to use and designed by curriculum experts – so whether the barrier to joining in was time or confidence, making it as easy as possible to teach poetry removed it.
For the same reason, we recommended that the resources themselves were completely redesigned. We took what used to be teacher notes and transformed them into student-facing worksheets that could also act as prompts and thought starters, and developed ideas around how poetry could be taken out of English lessons and built into music, drama, PE, art... Visual appeal was essential, but even more important was the ease and relevance of the materials, to help even unconfident teachers and time-poor to lead meaningful lessons.
Finally, we advised the client on how to retain teachers after National Poetry Day through data capture and contact engagement methods, aiming to ensure a longer-term impact.
Conceptually clear
The look and feel of our schools campaign was built out of the 2023 National Poetry Day identity. We took aspects of the supplied master illustration to create the theme of ‘Spark and Bloom’, to communicate how poetry can ignite the imaginations of young people and help them develop and grow in literacy, confidence and self-expression.
Top of the class
The success of the project was ultimately to be judged on the number of resource downloads achieved. Would teachers respond positively to the new worksheet style, and would our messaging strike a chord?
Happily, the answers were a resounding yes on both fronts. As well as an 83 per cent increase in the number of downloads year on year and a 100 per cent increase in the number of people who viewed the resources and then went on to download them, the average time visitors spent on the webpage rocketed from two seconds to almost two minutes.
Our social media content even caught some distinguished eyes, with a message being reposted by the Royal Family’s X/Twitter account, followed by more than 5.7 million people.
Making a positive impact on child literacy is something the whole Storycatchers team has long been passionate about and our involvement in this campaign is a direct result of the drive and determination of one of our Account Directors, who is committed to levelling the field for disadvantaged children through literacy support, working with a creative team with a background in producing educational materials. Pouring our passions into work like this and, critically, shifting the needle and delivering measurable results is why we do what we do...
Testimonial:“Partnering with Storycatchers has been nothing short of brilliant. They not only understood our needs but embraced our mission too. I was really struck by the whole team's commitment and how well they communicated with us at every stage. I'm really grateful to the team at Storycatchers who not only exceeded our expectations in terms of deliverables but also were just incredibly lovely to work with (it really makes a massive difference)!”
Jay Bhadricha. Head of Programmes.
Forward Arts Foundation
*Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and Macmillan Children’s Books: https://clpe.org.uk/system/files/2023-03/CLPE%20Poetry%20Survey%202023.pdf