We went away for a weekend residential to Swindon on 9 December 2011 to spend some time completing our project. The residential was with PGL, who offered us a lot of team activities alongside some morning sessions, which helped us to completion point of our campaign.
Residential – Day 1
We left London in the morning and headed up to Swindon PGL by minibus. We arrived in time for lunch then headed outside for some activities. We did a zip wire activity, then learnt some survival skills. We spent the evening team building with some team tournaments of darts and table tennis, which everybody really enjoyed.
Residential – Day 2
AM - Media challenge
We started the morning off with a team challenge.
Group Activity:
The scenario was that the world had been taken over by adults who are rounding up and imprisoning all under 24s. It was down to us to organise a revolution to defend our age group from unjust incarceration.
Our challenge was to create a short video broadcast to call all under 24s across the UK and fight the oppression.
The video had to be:
- Shot in one take
- Less than one minute long
We uploaded our videos to YouTube and then watched them all together.
We were introduced to the idea that this residential was all about the future. To get a clear vision for our campaign and know what success would be, we did an exercise where we put ourselves two months into the future after the campaign had launched.
How does it feel?
- Great!
- See the changes we’ve affected
- Strong impact
- People thinking positive
- Putting away knives and guns and getting stuck into education
- Boris Johnson, Barak Obama and David Cameron support our campaign
How many people have we reached (young people)?
- 7,372
What do people think?
- Opened their eyes
- Best poster they’ve ever seen
- 95% positive feedback
- 3% didn’t understand
- 2% negative
Where’s the best places people have seen the poster?
- Buses/bus stops
- West end McDonalds - instead of a toy, a poster
- Tube
- Westminster
- Newspapers – top story (Metro, Evening Standard, South London press)
- Downing Street
What do you plan to do next?
- Start a new project
We then looked at everyone’s personal stories and why we all care about the campaign.
Personal stories
We split up into two groups and interviewed everyone, one at a time whilst everyone else made notes. We discussed and decided who will represent the group by telling their stories if asked by the press, etc.
- Name, age and where you live
- What was your best experience growing up?
- What has your experience been of knife crime or the effects of knife crime?
- How did that make you feel?
- What do you think the effects were on other people i.e. victim, victim’s family, perpetrator, etc.?
- What do you want to say to people who might become involved with knife crime?
- How do you think this poster campaign could help?
We reviewed our footage so far and decided on what we would use to send to the video editor to be edited professionally.
PM
After lunch we all headed out for some more team building activities. These were trapeze and quad biking which was really great fun and very muddy.
Day 3
AM - Presentation and public speaking
We started off the session by discussing a group activity:
Set the scene - You've been invited back to the Salmon Centre to launch your poster campaign with their football group at the end of the matches. There will be 20 young people, aged 12-15 years old and you've go 3 minutes to find out:
What do you want them to go away thinking?
- Think about how important life is
- How knife crime can affect them
What do you want them to feel?
- Guilty
- Ashamed
- Aware/a bit scared
How would you like them to describe it to their friends?
- Carrying a knife isn't good
We looked at speeches and what makes a good one. We watched a YouTube video of the world famous speech 'I have a dream' by Martin Luther King.
We discussed what worked well about the speech:
- Repetition
- Relating to his audience
- Inclusive
- Rhythm
- Contrast
- Metaphor
- Makes it personal
- Quotes
- Holds to account
We did an exercise as individuals, after being handed a sheet of knife crime stats. This was to look at how we will address people, i.e. the media with some form of speech.
We had to answer the following questions:
- What's your key message?
- What stats would you use?
- How would you explain your reason for doing the poster?
We had to see what stats that we had remembered during our discussion as the average person listens to approx 17% of a presentation:
- Knife crime in London is up by 23%
- Lambeth has the highest rate of knife crime
- 2076 knife crime incidents in London
- Knife crime has rised from 13.6% since 2006
We looked at AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) and how we can get people's attention. We split onto three groups and acted out how we would approach and get young people interested in our campaign. Some ideas were:
- Play pool/a game
- Make a deal
- Use sweets
Campaign message and social media
We all finalised our campaign message and name and looked at some of the campaigns that have already been done.
We decided on the text:
- Is this the life you want? - as our main rhetorical question on the poster
- Your choice, your future - we decided to use as our logo and at the bottom of our poster
Finally we set up a campaign Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and WordPress account so that we can promote our campaign, keep everyone updated, etc.
PM
Some of the group did an aeroball activity. We all recorded a short video of what the main thing we got out of the weekend.
Everybody had a really great weekend and learnt lots of new skills including team building and all about speeches.
