The Communities for Refugees campaign was launched by Reset in October 2020 and ran until April 2021. This was the first coordinated attempt at sponsor recruitment in the UK. For the first time, charities across the refugee protection sector and faith organisations promoted Community Sponsorship to their networks using consistent branding and messaging.

Our priority for this campaign was to increase the number of Community Sponsors rather than to raise general awareness of Community Sponsorship. Our communication was therefore targeted at people who, based on evidence from the UK and Canada, were the most likely to set up Community Sponsorship groups. To reach our target audience, we connected with organisations whose audiences matched or heavily overlapped with ours, and encouraged them to share the campaign with their followers. This saw the campaign promoted widely within the refugee protection sector and by a number of faith organisations, as well as by existing Community Sponsors and Lead Sponsors.

We aimed to take prospective sponsors who engaged with the campaign on a journey that would inspire them to take part in Community Sponsorship while also communicating the level of commitment that this programme demands. The journey involved: registering interest by signing up to a mailing list; attending an introductory webinar; and speaking 1:1 to a member of the Reset team. Once a prospective sponsor completed these steps, they would be ready to connect with a Lead Sponsor and begin setting up a new Community Sponsorship group.

We’ve put together a short report covering the key results of the campaign, along with a summary of what we’ve learnt and how we plan to build on the campaign going forward.