Following our previous work with The FA to help grassroots volunteers to market their clubs and leagues more effectively with the What’s Your Pitch? campaign, we were commissioned by the Respect team to create a communications campaign to drive up behavioural standards of players and team officials within the National League System (NLS).
The NLS is characterised by smaller leagues and clubs with a keen sense of their own identity and pride in their heritage. Running a football club in the NLS and sustaining a squad, a home ground and the travel requirements of fixtures means that finances are generally tight with many clubs living ‘hand to mouth’. For this reason spectator attendance, locally derived sponsorship revenue and funding is an important revenue stream for clubs.
The playing environment in much of the NLS means that spectators are often very close to the action and any bad language and dissent on and around the pitch can easily be picked up on by spectators and word can soon spread around the local community, damaging the reputation and opportunities of clubs up and down the country.
We wanted to create a campaign that engaged everyone involved in running an NLS club – from the chairman to the fans – and addressed the fundamental link between abusive behaviour and the success of the club, both on the pitch and financially. In order to better understand the situation before the project was in full swing, we interviewed a number of NLS organisers who gave us an insight into their experiences of dealing with the issues we were aiming to address.
The campaign style follows the look and feel of the What’s Your Pitch? campaign, as The FA felt that this would work well for the two similar audiences.
Underpinning the whole Use Your Head campaign is an emotive, animated video, which explores the effects that bad language can have at grassroots level and encourages everyone to get involved and start tackling bad language.
A set of online customisable resources were also created including posters, banners and bibs for leagues to create their own localised campaign via the Your Game website.
All of the materials are available to download via the Your Game website.