Salix Homes are a a not-for-profit charitable organisation, and owns and manages over 8,000 homes in Salford, which comprises a real mix of properties including tower blocks, large housing estates and sheltered housing complexes.
Salix Homes are here to transform lives and support communities, customers and their homes. They work with specialist partner organisations to provide jobs, training opportunities and support for local people, to help with their personal development and wellbeing. Salix Homes also fund a range of local projects and initiatives that benefit the wider community.
Salix had recently gone through a major restructure which changed the focus of how they delivered services to customers. Much of this involved taking over some services once provided by Salford City Council and this new approach included the introduction of neighbourhood teams who would be the ‘faces’ of Salix homes, dealing with the tenancy management and community engagement. The reasoning behind these changes were due to the customers vocal need for greater local focus, dedicated area based teams for resolving issues and to be a first point of contact.
Love Your Neighbourhood is a friendly and engaging campaign helping Salix Homes launch their new neighbourhood-focused service model, introduce neighbourhood teams, and build community pride across Salford.
Salix Homes came to us to help launch this new approach and embed the key messages needed to develop a long-lasting customer campaign.
The concept had to play on the most tangible change; ‘improvement’ and one which would most likely resonate with residents and front line staff. It also needed to be striking enough to work as a standalone graphic or hashtag, but also be incorporated into future deliverables.
The campaign needed to be friendly and appealing and demonstrate commitment to the places where people live, encouraging community pride. So we introduced our lovable mascot characters. Terry the terraced town house and Lofty the tower flat apartment.
We created them as isometric 3D illustrated characters in the Salix brand identity style and manipulated them to interact with live photography to develop the core creative for the campaign, this would then be developed into a fully integrated campaign.
A new CRM system was also introduced to the organisation to facilitate a new way of working enabling one point of contact, greater knowledge of customers and tailored services. This meant we were able to send a personalised direct message to 8,500+ homes introducing the Neighbourhood Teams and summarising the new services available to residents.
We created designs for lamp post style banners that adorned the neighbourhoods. Branded t-shirts for team members, balloons and pull-up banners for pop up events and community centres were provided for each neighbourhood.
To tie the campaign together as a whole we animated an infographic to explain the purpose of the new neighbourhood teams. The aim was to work with Salix to help create a recognisable identity for the residents to feel affiliated to. Helping promote this we designed livery for rear of their vehicles, hi-vis vests for estate walkabouts that were distinct for each neighbourhood, greeting cards for each team, as well as ‘sorry we missed you’ cards for residents that were out when the teams called.
Following the initial launch we then developed the campaign with further messaging for ‘Love your garden / balcony’ cards to help connect with even more residents.
The campaign received some really positive feedback from residents and the distinct identities for each neighbourhood made them feel part of a valued community.
