Communication is a virus

For this brief we worked in pairs and chose to propose an idea that would Get People To Try Something New.

We want to encourage our audience to change their habits, so we are targeting it towards families with children age between 8 - 12 years, as at this age it is often difficult to keep them entertained and get them involved in doing fun things together as a family. We want to break the mould, stop them watching TV and put some fun back into their parents mundane routine.

So with this in mind we want to set our audience a fun, mini challenge. They will be introduced to a set of activities to liven up their monthly calendar. An activity will be sent once a month, for 3 months, in the form of a postcard. The first postcard will come with a calendar for the year and the postcards can be attached onto each monthly page, making it interactive and an exciting activity in itself that will keep the children looking forward to the next one coming through the post. It also means they'll have somewhere to keep them and they won't just get thrown away.

We realise that there are already existing websites offering fun for families, but none of them are well known and parents don't always think of the internet as their first choice for suggestions. There is one website called familyfun.com that offers so many activities for all seasons, indoor and outdoor, so we wanted to promote their activities and their website by putting the address at the bottom, or back of our postcards. Our research mainly stems from questionnaires, where we asked "if you could try something new today, what would it be?" We found a lot of responses were cheap, easy to do activities that they just never get round to doing, like go for a picnic, or make homemade ice cream. We also asked if you received a postcard for our mini challenge, would you and your family get involved and we got 100% yes's for our idea.

We've got a few examples of what our postcards could look like, with an eyecatching, fun design suitable for the children with either just the name of the challenge on the front or with an illustration to go with it. The back will show the rules of the activity and what you'll need to prepare before you begin, aiming more at the parents so they can explain the rules and perhaps visit the website for similar ideas if this one is a success. All our designs will use the main two colours of the family fun website and we will use them for the calendar too.

We narrowed it down to 12 activities (one a month) and chose the unusual ones with fun names for each, hopefully making them curious to find out what it involves, therefore keeping the motivation going. This should add a subtle persuasive tone of voice but in an informal, fun way. If they like the idea of these fun reminders then they can sign up after the 3 trail months are over and keep it going for the whole year to fill up their calendar.