THE FORWARD ARTS FOUNDATION: NATIONAL POETRY DAY. Agency: Storycatchers and Stu the CopywriterRecruiting thousands of children to break a world record and express themselves through poetry.
Skills used: creative strategy, concept development, visual design, educational content development, animation and edit, campaign planning, multi-channel delivery, partnership collaboration
Outcomes:
The project reached 125,000+ students through teacher-led delivery
43,316 children became Guinness World Records™ breakers
26,165 page views of the free ‘plug and play’ classroom resources page
4,388 new teachers signed up to be part of National Poetry Day activities
Following the incredible success of our schools engagement campaign for National Poetry Day in 2023, the Forward Arts Foundation asked us for help again in 2024 – but this time with a record-breaking twist…
As well as providing and promoting ‘plug and play’ classroom materials to encourage more teachers to get involved in teaching poetry, we helped deliver an easy and exciting alternative: the opportunity for school children to take part in the world’s largest online poetry class as part of a Guinness World Records™ attempt.
Every child counts
The National Poetry Day theme for 2024 was ‘Counting’. So we wrapped all our creative in a simple ‘National Poetry Day + You’ idea – with numbers and sums peppered throughout. All alongside a distinctive illustration style, created by Harkiran Kalsi and brought to life, by me, in a number of energetic, colourful ways across the many elements of the campaign.
Getting our messaging into teaching communities
Engaging with time-poor audiences is never easy. But we learned a lot from our 2023 campaign. We partnered with key influencers and organisations, implementing a blend of organic outreach and paid promotions within teaching communities. Our strategy aimed to spread the word about National Poetry Day, highlight the educational value of poetry and communicate the ease of getting involved.
We focused on free teaching resources developed by curriculum experts and refined by us so that they were ready to simply ‘plug and play’ as a lesson – making them an easy way to introduce poetry into the classroom and overcoming the biggest barriers, whether teachers lacked the time or confidence to plan a poetry lesson.
Giving schools a record-breaking alternative way to take part
If teachers didn’t want to lead their own poetry lesson, they could take part in poet Laura Mucha’s – and bag their pupils a world record title at the same time.
A huge part of this year’s campaign focussed on recruiting teachers and schools from all over the world to take part in a Guinness World Records™ attempt for Largest Poetry Lesson (multiple venues).
Our aim at the outset was 60,000 students but with the pre-live lesson participation we bagged more than than double that, which was incredible.
More than 125,000 students took part in generating ideas using worksheets we co-created with Laura.
These ideas were submitted to Laura ahead of the attempt to enable her to draft a poem for everyone to work on during the official Guinness World Records™ title attempt live-lesson.
On National Poetry Day itself, Laura led an official Guinness World Records™ title attempt for the largest ever multi-venue poetry lesson, hosted by Zoom. The result? They did it!
Laura, along with 43,516 children from schools across the globe became Guinness World Records™ holders!
This long (7 mins) but very lovely video shows how it happened and the amazing results. It’s rough and ready but full of heart, passion and enjoyment.
You can read the final poem here…
The outcomes were really amazing and I’m very proud to have been a part of making it happen…