AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION.
The Education Union was a supporter of the Gonski Education reforms - a series of game changing recommendations forwarded to the Government by David Gonski, who deduced that over the past decade, the performance of Australian students had declined at all levels of achievement compared to international benchmarks.
Although commissioned by the Federal Government, the report had been stalled within the walls of Parliament and the Education Union wanted to ‘rattle the cages.’
The challenge was doing it for relatively little money.
Our solution was to mobilise the most powerful weapon schools have. Parents. To pick up the baton and run with it. By mobilising them, giving them access to downloadable assets, a rallying cry, an online ‘meeting place’ and purposeful messaging we built more than an ad campaign.
This lived, breathed and grew on social media.
Launch TV commercial.
When we said we’d create a groundswell, we weren’t kidding. Thousands of green hands on sticks were placed in the grounds surrounding Parliament House one night. In the morning we even got the then PM Julia Gillard to join in.
Once we saw parents baking green cakes for Gonski fete days, and kids making banners in art class, and heard news readers leading bulletins with the the phrase ‘thousands of teachers marched on parliament today declaring why they give a Gonski’ - we knew our work was done. The campaign had gone viral. All we had to do was provide downloadable elements for people to put together their own messaging.
The hands were in the hands of the people.
