Thames Valley Police and Hampshire Constabulary came to us together with a genuinely public-interest brief: move non-emergency crime reporting online, take the pressure off 999 and 101 call handling, and free police resource for real emergencies.
Think Before You Dial had to land with the general public across two separate force territories — several million residents combined. It had to establish that online reporting existed, that it was credible, and that trained staff — not a bot — sat behind it. And it had to earn attention in feeds engineered to bury public-service messaging.
Behaviour-change work is a different discipline from commercial media. There's no funnel, no cart, no conversion event in the usual sense — success means shifting what a whole population knows and does, which demands different creative and different targeting logic.
Mobile advertising and paid social carried the campaign — chosen for their ability to hit specific geographic boundaries with high frequency and contextual relevance. Both territories were geo-targeted to postcode level, with creative adapted to each force's own messaging and branding.
On mobile, contextually targeted display ran across news, sport and lifestyle apps — the places residents already encounter local information. On social, Facebook and Instagram carried the load, with Instagram Stories proving especially effective by sitting natively inside content streams.
Creative was engineered for the first two seconds: static and video formats that communicated the message before the scroll, with a deliberately low-friction call to action — real people handle this, not an automated system; one click to start.
The campaign delivered over 4 million impressions and 48,800 unique clickthroughs to the reporting pages across the two territories in six weeks — a substantial volume of residents actively engaging with online reporting.
Instagram reach rose 60% against the preceding six weeks, and Hampshire Constabulary's Facebook reach hit 1.55 million — up 35% — evidence of how paid activity compounds organic reach for public sector accounts.
The lesson travels well beyond the UK: public sector communications can achieve population-scale behaviour change through precision digital channels, without broadcast budgets — exactly the approach we bring to public sector and social-impact briefs in Canada.
Thames Valley Police · Social Impact & Awareness · UK
