#MadeInSocialHousing: A win for campaigning – and framing – at the Budget

There will be people in policy and campaigns team this week feeling like they didn’t get everything that they wanted from the Chancellor’s budget – but they were heard – they did get something.

Maybe the excellent team at Shelter are among them? The Chancellor even name-checked them when she announced limits to the right to buy social homes in the Budget. They have shown – yet again, that campaigning works.

Shelter’s #MadeInSocialHousing campaign is a fantastic example of framing that is effective in winning hearts and minds for the case for decent, affordable homes for all. And we’ve been pleased to share our framing research and advice with them.

There are (at least) three things that this campaign does very well:

1. There’s a range of stories from different people – from Suggs to father and son Shandor and Billy. This adds scale and makes it much harder to dismiss a story as a one-off exception.
2. The stories bring what ‘home’ really means to life. They speak to how our homes shape us, and how they allow us to build a life.
3. They tell a story that goes further than calling out the housing crisis. They paint a picture of something to fight for. This builds a sense of efficacy – that it is possible to build a new generation of social homes.

Shelter then built on this campaign foundation, with a specific call directed at the Government to reform the right to buy to social homes. And here, Shelter have applied a vital policy campaign principle – another that’s relevant way beyond campaigns for homes and housing: they do not confuse their strategy with their communications strategy.

Most campaigning organisations will have a strategy. It might set out their theory of change, all the things that they want to see happen. They will most likely have a mission statement, a vision, some values. A good strategy can be vitally important as a decision-making tool and acts as a north star. Before I joined FrameWorks, I was Director of Strategy at the NSPCC so I say this with real conviction.

However, your organisational strategy is not your communications strategy.

You can tell when an organisation has forgotten this.

Perhaps they will try to turn their vision into a call to action. A vision is an outcome, it doesn’t tell you what needs to happen to realise it and most visions make a pretty lousy calls to action.

Or they talk about all of the things they want to change. This inevitably becomes vague – instead of focussing on a much smaller set of concrete, specific, tangible actions that could be taken.

The best campaigns strip things back and accept that they are building a room in the palace of their vision – not the whole palace in one go. Campaigns – like Shelter’s – can still be bold and ambitious and tap into fundamental values while being clear about the particular change they want to see first.  Campaigners who did this might well be feeling more pleased about the budget this week than those who didn’t.