How Cold is It?
By: Lewys Gammond-Phillips
Tags: Ideas, UK, Homeless, Marketing, Homelessness

How Cold is It?

Rough sleeping is on the rise. Source: NAO.

This is a question I’ve asked myself in the mornings before work. Sat in my car at 7:00 am, waiting for it to warm up before beginning my commute. Cold hands, tired eyes and a visible breath.

When I get to work, I do a bit of admin and check my emails. I usually have a quick check of the news too. So, I felt sad to see that the ONS had estimated 778 people in England and Wales had died whilst homeless in 2019. The fifth year in a row of cases rising.

What broke my heart was that “the mean age at death was 45.9 years for homeless males and 43.4 years for females”, almost half the life lived by their counterparts with homes in the general population.

Here I am, asking myself how cold is it? When thousands of people live and sleep on the streets in the harsh British winters.

Sobering statistics. Each number represents a life lost that could have been saved. Homelessness is preventable. And there is so much economics and politics to it, and solving it.

I thought I could write about how austerity was a direct cause of rough sleeping doubling in ten years. That in 2019, there were 225,845 long-term (6+ months) empty properties in England alone. Maybe how the implementation of universal basic income could replace failing universal credit. Or how it has been proven possible to end rough sleeping because the government temporarily did so earlier this year.

Instead, I had a marketing campaign idea, that a charity like Crisis could use, that I thought I would be worth sharing. All in relation to the question I ask myself on those cold, dark winter mornings. How cold is it?

Steal the Weather

I love the NASA climate change webpage(s). Source: NASA.

First of all, I want to talk about what the idea is. And then we’ll outline the goals of the campaign. After that, we can go through the main components step by step.

The idea is to create an informative and resourcefulness landing page, with a tool, revolving around the weather. The tool would allow users to enter their postcodes and discover the hottest, coldest, wettest, snowiest and more days of their areas in history.

Websites like the Met Office already have some of this data readily available. I kind of want to take that lacklustre presentation of the data and turn it into the NASA climate change and global warming webpage. (Is 2020 the year of data? Charts? Are we sick of these or do we have a newfound respect for them in helping us understand complex matters? Next slide, please).

The aim is to hijack a query that millions of Brits search every month (20,400,000 searches for the word “weather”). And then provide them with not only a weather forecast and the historical weather data of their area, but to then present them with the future of weather. How climate change/global warming is going to bring on more extreme temperatures, and change where and how we live.

So, what’s this got to do with homelessness? When I think about how cold it is in the car before I go to work, I can turn the heaters on. Someone homeless may not be able to do that.

By exposing people to the British past and future of weather, they can better understand how harsh this would be on the livelihoods of homeless people. Especially those who are sleeping rough. They can be reminded of the home comforts they possess — listening to the rain outside from the comfort of their bed or turning a newly bought fan on during a heatwave.

The ultimate goal is donations. I envision people landing on this page, seeing the weather forecast and then using the tool. They toy around with seeing some of their area’s coldest, hottest and wettest days, and then get presented with the future of weather. How uncomfortably hot summers will be and how normal freezing temperatures will become.

Finally, I want to tell them how much easier it will be for them to handle than their homeless counterparts. The use of stories and photography, contrasting the lives of each. Seeing a family in front of the fireplace during Christmas next to a tent covered in snow. Maybe, someone sunbathing next to a swimming pool, next to a person hiding in the shade from fear of being sunburnt.

Hopefully, the future of weather and how tough it’ll be on homeless people will provoke an emotional reaction in the person — enough to donate.

A secondary goal is to achieve a decently high number of high-quality backlinks. I think a lot of online news publications would pick up on the story. ‘Find Out the Hottest Day Ever in Your Town’s History — And What the Future Holds’. ‘Crisis Wants You to Know how Climate Change will Affect Homeless People’s Lives’.

Metrics like website visitors, time spent on site, bounce rates, etc. can be measured too. Hotjar would be especially good, to see how visitors interact with the landing page.

The opportunity to use climate change, a topic that will continue to trend for years to come, provides Crisis with another avenue of increasing brand awareness and getting donations from the public. The charity could even time and launch the campaign during the COP26 in Glasgow, which takes place in November 2021.

I think there’s also an opportunity to write several supporting blogs, like on topics such as climate refugees, all internally linking to this landing page. I bet there are so many stories that can serve as case studies on how hard it has been being homeless during extreme weathers.

And that’s the idea. I think a landing page, ranked/advertised and distributed well, targeting weather-related search queries and linking climate change to homelessness/rough sleeping could get a lot of hits, publicity and ultimately, donations.

Other Ideas

Viral TikTok about how much Jeff Bezos is worth. Source: Mashable.

Below, are some other ideas I had when writing and researching this piece.

The other day, I posted on my work’s social media pages about Christmas Jumper Day. Save the Children launched the event/holiday in 2012. It had me thinking, and sticking with the theme of weather, Crisis could find out the coldest and hottest British dates ever recorded. The charity could then team up with sporting teams across Britain to raise awareness and money. You think playing in these conditions are bad? Imagine living in them. Some webpages/blogs about the history behind it would be written in support.

We are obsessed with money. Enough so, that a TikTok visualising the wealth of Jezz Bezos using grains of rice went viral. But there are a lot of people, often manifested in their political beliefs, that they have more chance of becoming wealthy than they do bankrupt, for example. Why not compare the probabilities? Becoming a billionaire, millionaire or homeless? It could copy the same format of the original rice TikTok, and the charity could even have an influencer share it.

I also think blogging, possibly guest-blogging, about the economics of ending homelessness could make for good content marketing. The charity has already outlined in detail the cost and benefits of ending homelessness, but this could be enhanced by tackling more specific subjects in blogs. Universal basic income, and possibly even championing it, could be a topic that Crisis marketed about. In Britain, the topic gets 12,100 searches on Google each month.

Unfortunately, some of the most common causes of deaths in homeless people were drug poisoning and people killing themselves in 2019. I think collaborating with mental health and drug charities could help Crisis raise awareness.

Tara and George

Tara and George. Source: BBC.

In an era when Spotify dominates our lives, I still love radio. So, I’m often rotating between an album, a playlist, podcast or the radio. And a few years ago, I came across a story that Radio 4 broadcasted and I wanted to give it an honourable mention. Tara and George is a series exploring the lives of two people in their late 40s who sleep rough in London’s Spitalfields. It often had me holding back tears when listening.

I also wanted to point out that I realise not everyone who is homeless sleeps rough. Crisis has a list of the different types of homelessness.

When speaking with people about the problems we face, I always try to point out that things can be bad and also be getting better. We are often slowing down or reversing damage caused by issues that currently exist. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for homelessness. Core homelessness increased by 33% between 2011 and 2016. All types of homelessness is forecasted to keep increasing until 2041.

Shelter estimates there are 280,000 homeless people in England alone. Change is needed.

As well as writing this piece, I have made a donation to Crisis. If you can afford to, please do so too. Thank you for reading. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.