Principally important, how a client became one of the team – it’s all in the culture

Annabel tells us how she ended up joining OneFifty…

So as social is our USP, I thought copying a current social trend would be the way to go…

How it started…

It began when a fellow founder of Advance Together, our micro political party, started looking for the hottest ‘young things’ to do our social. Claire did a Google search for companies based in the area – we wanted it to be a local company because, well, we were all about localism – and lo and behold there was OneFifty. What we needed was a company that could understand our values, our ideas and translate them across a variety of social platforms to the people that mattered. And it meant helping a small group of generally novice campaigners fed up with the status quo, who wanted to create the difference.

It was critical that OneFifty needed to really get what we were trying to do: changing politics, which was no small feat. For Alex and Katie it was a challenge channeling those high expectations and our policy ideas into micro-targeted messages straight to the voters we needed to reach. And they needed to be thoughtful and sensitive to our area, still reeling from Grenfell and to our first time, nervous, candidates.

And they were. We had a great campaign, we made our mark and it worked! The fact that statistically we could show that there was a positive relationship between votes for Advance and the amount people saw our content online proved social works.

From that first experience I was impressed, the results themselves would have been enough, but I also enjoyed working with Alex, Katie and the broader team so much that I returned to use OneFifty again and again. Each campaign got larger, each requirement more exacting. We started in the local elections with 12 candidates and then moved to the national scene with a far bigger budget and considerable pressure to perform.

And then in the 2019 General Election we were working in 78+ marginal seats with a complex array of different messages for ‘pools’ of voters in specific postcodes leading to a multitude of different websites. The last campaign required considerable attention to detail, very tight deadlines, exceptionally responsive team-work across continents and ungodly hours. Nothing like pressure to really understand how people tick – the fact that we came out on the other side still friends speaks volumes…

In our campaigns I could see the results – data driven, intuition verified digital interactions means votes. The right social communications can create a difference and we can effect change for all types of organisations. That is compelling. There is a world of opportunity and potential with driving purposeful digital interactions. It is an enticing landscape, constantly changing, demanding attention and original thought. It is a perfect fit for someone, like me, who loves data, people and breaking boundaries!

…And so how is it going?

Well that all added up to be a really interesting proposition, alongside a culture that appeals, and so I’ve joined… making sure I can be an architect of what comes next.