The Partnership’s Families for Children Team was recently awarded the Best Online Campaign at the Scottish Creative Awards for their recent #opentofostering campaign. It was also Highly Commended in the Creative Strategy category - Integrated Strategy.

Cathy Coll, Service Manager at Families for Children, said: “We are delighted to have won this prestigious award. Having previously run several campaigns we were able  to use our experience to plan our new campaign. We focused on cost effective digital advertising which has the advantage of being easy to analyse.”

The idea for the #opentofostering campaign grew out of a collaborative process with carers, staff and the external agency, STV Creative. Key to the campaign planning process was the Council’s wider strategic priorities: with increasing emphasis being placed on keeping vulnerable children in their own communities where possible, with the help of additional supports, we wanted to create a campaign which could be easily amended to ask people to consider the various ways of helping Glasgow’s children.

During the campaign we also used Could you be #opentoadoption and Could you be #opentoshortbreaks. This campaign placed an increasing emphasis on the need for Short Break carers, allowing people who had never considered fostering to realise it was something they might do. More information on the website http://fosterglasgow.org/