The Australian Futures Project (AFP), is dedicated to shifting Australia’s national conversation to create a better future. As part of this, they engaged Australia's leading consumer, industry and market research company, Roy Morgan, to identify the top concerns of Australians through data.

This data revealed Australians broadly shared similar concerns, regardless of age, gender or socioeconomic status. When compared to political and media dialogue there was a clear discrepancy – Australians were most concerned about long-term issues like climate change, while their leaders were focused on short-term concerns like illegal immigrants.

Our brief was to use the insights gathered to create a public intervention during the federal election and shift the national conversation to the things that mattered most. More specifically, there were four key objectives:

1) Increase focus on long-term issues

2) Enhance AFP’s profile and legitimacy

3) Protect the reputation of its Executive Director, Ralph Ashton

4) Activate the public to help ‘Change the Conversation’

The brief was aligned to the organisation's greater goal of ending short-termism in Australia. With almost no budget for paid media, a need to connect with some of Australia's most powerful voices and a brief to influence the nation's media and political conversation, using the data and insights to engage the public through PR was critical to the campaign's success.

The creative idea and use of insights

Our solution was to use the data gathered to highlight the disconnect between Australia's loudest voices (media and government) and the people they represent.

To do this, we created The Perfect Candidate – Australia’s first politician driven by data, not bias – a first for Australian politics. Powered by insights from over 125,000 Australians, The Perfect Candidate uses this data to compare the top concerns of each electorate, with those of the political parties that represent them. By sharing the data they’ve gathered, The Perfect Candidate creates a transparency that empowers Australians to change the conversation and hold their leaders accountable.

Roy Morgan provided 12-years of data based on 50,000 face-to-face interviews with Australians, ranking the three most important issues, segmented by postcode, electorate, age, generation, gender, their voting intention and income.

Roy Morgan’s CEO, Poll Manager, and Social Scientist interpreted the data – developing several hypotheses and testing them with the data sets. La Trobe University, in conjunction with AFP, developed an interactive data dashboard, forming the heart of our campaign.

Further insights were garnered from 1,000 interviews, conducted by AFP with leaders across Australia (summary here). Policy statements from political parties and independents were ranked to indicate which concerns should be prioritised.

These insights identified that our core challenge was data/research related. We needed to humanise Roy Morgan’s rich dataset, combined with additional AFP insights, to ensure the true concerns of the nation were at the forefront of the national conversation.

The strategy

Three key players sat at the heart of the national conversation:

1)  The Public – want to see progress, offering their attention

2) The Media – want attention (and subsequent revenue), offering exposure

3. Parliament – want exposure (and subsequent power), offering progress

To drive change within the system and shift the national conversation toward Australia's long-term concerns, our strategy was to create the following chain of reaction:

1) Mobilise the public to create noise about what matters to them

2) Connect with the media to encourage them to bolster momentum and drive government attention

3) Utilise the public noise and media momentum to gain government attention, drive debate and ultimately shift the conversation.

The execution

In a first for Australian politics, we created The Perfect Candidate (TPC). A digital candidate powered by data insights from real Australians, entering the federal election race to shift our national conversation from short-term problems to long-term solutions.

TPC allowed Australians to search and understand key concerns in their local electorate and the whole country. Using research, Australians compared these concerns to what was being prioritised and talked about by politicians, holding them to account. They were prompted to ‘change the conversation’ by reaching out via social media or their local talk-back radio stations to share their concerns and ask their leaders what they’re doing to fix them.

Timing was crucial. Launching on 10 April, post-federal budget chatter and ironically the day before the federal election was called, gave us clear airtime to start the conversation, and shape national conversation.

To kick things off, we secured five face-to-face briefings with influential journalists, providing access to the tool (and data) two-weeks before launch. As the data was so rich, no two stories were alike. We worked closely with Jessica Irvine (The Age/SMH), Ben Potter (Australian Financial Review), Jackson Gothe-Snape (ABC), Annika Smethurst (Herald Sun) and Primrose Riordan (The Australian) to articulate the problem and provide a solution. These are pre-eminent journalists that span Australia’s most highly regarded and well-read media outlets.

Direct communications to the Chief of Staff for all major parties informed them of TPC, ensuring they weren’t surprised on launch day or the activation of its social handle (https://twitter.com/TPCandidate) which took on its own persona, direct messaging party leaders.

For data to have impact, it needed context. We used highly topical media angles like cost of living, environment and health, and seeded these to relevant media including the Federal Press gallery, mainstream news media, online political publications, morning and evening TV programs, regional press and radio talkback.

To maintain share of voice for the five-week campaign, a weekly Roy Morgan snap poll surveyed a representative cross-section of 1,000 Australians+, with results within 24 hours. We offered the data exclusively to our influential journalists and created targeted ads on social media that encouraged viewers to think long-term and discover TPC online.

With a plethora of data, we used live media monitoring to identify opportunities, tapping into conversations and remaining nimble in our approach. TPC directly tweeted politicians, journalists and the public using our data to point out discrepancies or mistruths in the national conversation.

This agile approach allowed us to manage reputational risk, track and assess the campaign, adapting our approach to achieve optimal outcomes.

The results

By condensing a 12-month campaign to five-weeks, we far exceeded expectations. We secured 84 million vs 10 million in reach, with quality outputs landing key messages aligned to campaign objectives. We doubled our target CTA, asking users to “rate their concerns” and compare them to their local Members of Parliament (achieving 3,000 vs 1,500). Further, our conversion rate was 20%, far surpassing our target of 2-5%, revealing we required a far smaller audience than anticipated (based on industry benchmarks) to reach our desired number of activations.

Critical success factors included:

• Constructive teamwork and problem-solving
• AFP’s non-partisan reputation
• Solid media-PR strategy and media contacts
• Quality of digital tool UX created by Isobar
• Roy Morgan research and data
• Responsiveness & relevance of the Roy Morgan Snap Polls
• Positive reinforcement between all elements of the overall strategy

In just five weeks and with just $5,000 in paid media, The Perfect Candidate achieved the following:

• Total reach +84 million
• Over 350 news articles
• 12 media engagements
• 9 Television features
• 19 radio spots
• Reported by all of Australia’s leading political journalists The Perfect Candidate was also used by the media as an insights tool to validate countless opinion pieces and features that explored what issues mattered most to Australians and how well our political parties represented them. As a result, the conversations driven by Australia’s media shifted from the short-term topics and sensationalist headlines to discussing the long-term issues Australians really care about.
• Over 3,000 people rated the issues that mattered most them (double our target)
• 94 Australians directly contacted their leaders via social media
• Conversion rate of website visitors was 20% (over 10 times our target and far higher than industry benchmark)
• No negative coverage or risks materialised
• 30% increase in the organisations Facebook and Twitter followers
• 20% increase in LinkedIn followers
• eDM subscribers increased
• AFP was endorsed by 11 key political influencers and their media share of voice dramatically increased.
• 772% ROI