National Poetry Day / recruiting thousands of children to become record-breakers
Role: Campaign concept, design, content development (worksheets and social assets) video editor. Agency: Storycatchers and Stu the copywriter
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. The outcomes were really amazing and I’m very proud to have been a part of making it happen. 125,000 pupils took part in the Guinness World Records™ event, 4,388 new teachers signed up and there were 26,165 views of the free school resources page.
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.
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.
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…