Scope: Time to Get Equal

Taking over London for one day in June 2009: Campaign concept, art direction, editing, design and general enthusiasm.

Scope's Time To Get Equal week is an annual event that builds buzz around their work, both within the organisation and in the world at large. In 2009, they asked us to come up with a campaign to launch the week. So we bashed our heads together and came up with London Gets Equal - an innovative / silly idea that turned out to be one of Scope's best received campaigns ever.

Our original idea was to send teams of volunteers and staff members out across London, armed with smartphones running Google Latitude (which was pretty futuristic back then). Each team had a pre-set destination in Hyde Park, and when everyone arrived their latitude avatars would spell 'Equal' across a Google map. As they moved across the city, they'd 'tag' examples of inaccessible facilities (like tube stations without lifts, or non-wheelchair friendly buses), raising awareness and generally making a fuss.

It didn't quite work out that way though. It's hard to get hold of loads of smartphones at short notice, especially when you haven't really got any money, so we decided to keep it real with a giant printed map of London and little circular counters for each team which we pushed around with sticks like in a World War II film.

Everybody involved had a great time and really got into it - a couple of teams managed to get into the ITN studios and ambushed Alastair Stewart (fortunately one of Scope's patrons), while some others managed to get hold of the Dean of St Pauls and harangue him about his stairs. We sent out film crews on limo bikes and rush-edited the results to release to the media the next day - the campaign was featured on Sky News and got loads of regional press and radio coverage. It was Third Sector Magazine's campaign of the month, and, more importantly, a great time was had by all.