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Quids for Kids Top Tips
Top tips for running take-up campaigns You can download the full top tips as PDF here You can download the file in WORD here
What do you need to do:
Set out below are are the main factors you need to take into consideration when planning and running your campaign. Practical examples are given in the good practice case studies.
1. Plan Your Campaign Any benefits take-up work requires good forward planning to be successful and this guide aims to give practical advice for promoting take-up. You will be looking at:
2. Identify Target Groups Defining your target group will give your work a clear focus. There are number of factors to take into account:
Your campaign goals and desired outcomes – for example, you may want to achieve large numbers of additional claims or you may want to concentrate effort on those most in need.
To work out who is under-claiming benefits and tax credits, you can draw on a number of sources:
The good practice case studies document available from the Child poverty toolkit website highlights two Citizens Advice Bureaux running tax credit take-up campaigns funded by HMRC in Selby and Brent.
3. Involve Partner Organisations You will certainly need to work with others in your take-up campaign. This might be different parts of the council but will also be partner agencies who are in contact with parents. Partners can help you both plan and deliver your campaign. They will have insights to offer on what parents need in terms of advice and support and the best ways to communicate with them.
Potential partners include:
Any take-up campaign will have knock on effects for other advice agencies and related service providers, and therefore involving them in the campaign and enlisting their support is essential. Thought needs to be given as to when and how is the most effective and inclusive way to involve others, sometimes at the initial planning stages, and sometimes when there is a clearer idea of who you are targeting.
Voluntary, community and faith organisations have contact with people who may not be claiming their full entitlements. Information can be usefully distributed in co-operation with these groups or staff – paid and volunteers - can be trained to help their clients complete claims for benefits. They could be approached well in advance to ask them for their ideas and whether they wish to be involved. Umbrella groups may be an effective way of making this approach.
Experience shows that parents like to receive advice and information from someone they trust, so it’s good practice to recruit different professionals like health visitors or doctors to help. You need to take care though that they don’t see this as extra work on top of their “day job” or worry that they will have to become experts in the benefits system. Their main role is to signpost people to extra help.
Involving partners also helps you to link advice and support on different services. Parents may well need support on a number of different fronts. For example parents going into work will probably need childcare as well as benefits advice. There are two examples of take-up work linked to childcare in the Good Practice document on the Child Poverty toolkit website, one run by the Daycare Trust and one run by Hertfordshire County Council.
The Good Practice document on the Child Poverty toolkit website gives more details of the wide range of organisations who can be involved effectively in take up campaigns.
4. Communicate Your Message A number of factors need to be considered:
The answer to these questions will depend in part on the level of funding available and what local contacts you have who could help spread the word. Check whether anyone in your council has done work to find out which “channels” local people prefer to use to receive information. A basic understanding of which groups of people read local newspapers or listen to local radio for example can give you a good starting point for focusing your efforts.
4.1 Campaign Materials Good quality, relevant information in an appropriate format is crucial to any take-up work. The ‘Quids for Kids’ tool-kit will shortly provide you with sample materials, which could form the basis for your campaign information.
Types of written material you may want to consider:
When designing any material, you need to consider providing it in formats, which cater for groups with specific needs:
4.2 Which Channels to Use There are a large number of ways of getting the take-up message out. You will need to decide which of these are appropriate to your target group and budget:
E-marketing is a useful way to reach some target groups. For example young people are more likely to look for information on a website, a local employer may include an information article on their intranet, or a group of professionals who work with your target group may have a website or receive regular e-newsletters. E-forums and bulletin boards on websites that are aimed at your target group may also be a good place to advertise a service, an event or to get across important information.
5. Tips for Success
The Good Practice toolkit highlights excellent take-up initiatives led by local authorities and voluntary sector organisations. The examples included cover a range of effective take-up approaches. Many of the campaigns cited incorporated a combination of approaches described below.
Media and PR activity
Successful approaches to engaging the media include:
Targeted advertising.
This approach is helpful when trying to reach specific client groups. It targets particular places, publications, agencies that the client is most likely to come into contact with. This approach can reach large numbers and generate a high volume of enquiries, but a distinct advantage of this approach is that the publicity can be staggered. Any resultant follow-up work is more manageable as it is spread over a period of time.
Targeted mailshots
Direct mailshots can target people who have been identified from data the local authority already holds as eligible for particular benefits. Housing benefit and council tax benefit (HB/CTB) records are the most commonly used sources to identify potential claimants. Local authority departments operate databases that can identify HB/CTB claimants who seem eligible for tax credits or income support. Once they’ve been identified, the individuals can be contacted regarding possible entitlement and what to do to claim. For example, More For Me & My Kids (MFMK) is the title adopted for the Tackling Lone Parent Worklessness strand of the Rightfully Yours initiative led by the Southwark Works partnership. MFMK was launched in spring 2005 and supported the aims of Southwark’s Employment Strategy and Employment Zone partners by using detailed data held by the Council’s Revenues and Benefit Service on some eight thousand workless lone parents to promote the message that work pays for lone parents, using targeted direct mail to get the message out to workless lone parents and including a hotline number for lone parents to contact local EZ providers.
Partner organisations can also send mailshots to their members/service users, for example PCT child development centres can write to families of disabled children in touch with community paediatric services to promote claims for disability living allowance.
Employees of large companies and public sector organisations can be targeted via wage slips and letters from HR.
Advice events and roadshows
Local campaigns have promoted take-up by tapping into planned community events such as local festivals and fun days. Other events during the year will be natural launch pads for publicising take-up itself (eg - an Advice Week) or for clients groups (eg - Carers Rights Day, World Mental Health Day). Another approach is to take out the advice service to one-off events or roadshows, such as family fun days and child safety days.
Outreach advice surgeries
Taking advice out to where local people are clearly makes it easier for potential clients to access advice. There are a variety of forms of outreach advice work. These range from regular advice sessions in places like Family Centres, libraries, leisure centres and community centres, ‘roving’ advice (eg - through mobile libraries, advice buses), and provision of electronic and video advice links. These approaches are especially useful in rural areas where the availability and cost of transport are a particular problem. Devon got round this problem by offering home visits (see the Good Practice document on the Child Poverty toolkit website for more information).
Assistance to claim and appeal
Most successful campaigns are those which can offer a personalised approach to individuals. Assistance to claim needs to be efficient, customer friendly and able to cope with the demand.
Before campaign publicity is designed, a decision must be made as to how much follow-up support can be offered. This may be at a number of levels:
You need to work out how you will handle an increased volume of enquiries. ….
6. Measure Outcomes Time-limited campaigns
When planning time-limited take-up work, an exit strategy needs to be considered. If the evaluation has proved the project to be a success, the exit strategy ideally should involve mainstreaming the work. Your monitoring should help you make the case. If the service is not able to continue in the same or different guise, then expectations of the users need to be managed.
How are you going to measure success?
In the modern climate of ‘evidence-based practice’, most funders will expect you to be able to show that the take-up work is effective and efficient. Designing and setting up monitoring systems for the take-up project is one of the most essential parts of the planning process.
Monitoring and evaluation procedures need to be built into the development stages of new initiatives. It is important that clear and consistent methods are put in place for the collection of data on benefits checks and new claims.
Things you may wish to monitor:
This qualitative information can be gathered from questionnaires, follow-up interviews, user focus groups, stakeholder interviews or letter of thanks from clients.
You may wish, in the longer term, to compare numbers of benefit and tax credit recipients over the course of a campaign.
Find out more
Look at the Child Poverty toolkit website Good Practice document to find out more about successful take-up campaigns.
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