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The Brief

Every year, poor countries lose $160bn to tax dodging by large multinational companies! That’s enough to end world hunger, eradicate AIDS and provide every child on the planet with an education. BUT, tax is a very BORING subject for most people, so the issue is largely ignored. We were tasked with coming up with a solution with ActionAid.

The solution

We worked with ActionAid on putting together a strategy to get people talking about Tax Justice. Key to getting politicians to act is to demonstrate that lots of people care about it… but a supporter petition – while being the traditional route – is not the most powerful; our idea is to do stuff that will get press coverage, thereby giving politicians opportunities to voice their opinion.

A one-off stunt isn’t sufficient either – we needed an idea that could engage politicians over several years. Thankfully, ActionAid have loads of passionate supporters – much better than big ad budgets!

So, we decided to grow a group of people to continually keep the press interested in tax justice. That means being conversational and action-oriented - through the kind of group actions outlined by Mark Earls in his book (and blog) Herd.

When “being conversational”, you need a tone of voice (in fact, that’s pretty much what the creative strategy is for conversational campaigns). Given where ActionAid sit in this conversation; i.e. between real people who aren’t that interested, politicians and serious journalists, we settled on Ali Dimleby – a mashup of Ali G and David Dimbleby!

So, what creative concept would deliver on this strategy? After much pondering, The Outlandish Revenue Service was born, and set up to go to ludicrous lengths to achieve tax justice! It was felt this had just the right amount of satirical bite, and communicated that the issue was tax-based… yet still fun.

Finally, we got The Outlandish Revenue Service up and running:

• We created design guidelines for all future collaborative projects (we’ll tell you about those in future ‘Our work’ posts!)
• We built a dedicated area on the ActionAid website to house them all.
• We co-wrote a blog and plugged-in loads of social technology to allow group members to communicate.
• We also put our copywriting and graphic design skills to good use, producing a collection of informative web pages, and a campaigning guide for people to educated themselves about the issue of tax justice.

The results

Before The Outlandish Revenue Service was launched (and in the spirit of how we intend to conduct the entire campaign) ActionAid supporters were surveyed about the idea. Only 2.49% of respondents said they didn’t think that being outlandish about tax was the way forward!

The “Tax Reminder” blog is now consistently one of the best-read pieces of content on the ActionAid UK site (despite tax being one of the least emotive subjects!)

And that’s before any of the Outlandish Revenue Service’s ludicrous projects got under way… you can see them here, and we’ll post write-ups of them soon.