We reached 40% of all UK students with the key facts about tax and National Insurance
The challenge
HMRC asked us to help students start to understand their tax affairs while at university so that they can manage better in the future.
Our response
Understanding the importance of online media among students was key to our strategy in delivering tailored digital resources:
- a website
- YouTube clips explaining key tax themes (National Insurance, paperwork and how to claim a refund)
- a Tax Refund Calculator and quiz applications on Facebook
To support this online activity, we:
- engaged with student bloggers and briefed on the campaign
- produced posters and leaflets and distributed them through universities
- undertook an extensive briefing programme for stakeholders
- contacted all top 60 UK universities and worked closely with organisations such as the NUS, banks and careers advice organisations.
The launch was underpinned by media relations activity which generated coverage in the Guardian and the Daily Mail.
The results
We reached approximately 40% of all UK students (600,000) with our campaign materials. Stakeholders were overwhelmingly supportive, as was 100% of the media coverage. We drove 18,000 hits to the campaign web site during the first three-month period (Google was the top referrer as a result of our search engine optimisation). The Facebook quiz application “Codebreaker” was used by 12,000 users, almost double the target reach of 7,000.
Watch the video
HMRC video case study from Fishburn Hedges on Vimeo.
