The Ramblers helps everyone, everywhere, enjoy walking. They are the only charity dedicated to looking after paths and green spaces, leading walks, opening up new places to explore, and encouraging everyone to get outside and discover how walking boosts health and happiness. With the future maintenance of paths under threat as Britain prepares to leave the EU, the charity needed help producing shareable assets to communicate the legislative changes they are lobbying for to help protect and enhance public access to the countryside.

The Agriculture Bill, currently moving through the House of Commons, will bring in a raft of new legislation for the countryside to replace EU law, covering everything from direct payments for farmers to marketing standards. In the summer, Ramblers launched the ‘Your Path Awaits’ campaign, aiming to influence the Agriculture Bill to include public access as a key public good for which farmers would receive public money. Having achieved this initial aim, the charity shifted its focus to securing amendments to the bill which would strengthen the wording to ensure the best outcomes for Britain’s network of public paths.

Looking to engage and mobilise their supporters and the wider public with their campaign asks, Ramblers engaged Manifesto to produce a short animated video to bring to life the concept of ‘enhancing public access’ and cut through the wider debate around the agriculture bill, which includes farming, biodiversity and conservation, among other big issues.

What we did

Manifesto set out to create a short animation for Ramblers that would help mobilise the charity’s supporters and members of the public to influence the new Agriculture Bill. We had already conducted in-depth audience analysis to identify segments of the public who would be interested in the issue for an earlier phase of the ‘Your Path Awaits’ campaign. We were therefore able to design the animation with these groups in mind, tailoring the content and tone to reach the people most likely to take action and add their voices to those already calling for change.

We worked closely with the campaigns team at Ramblers to devise the narrative content of the animation, ensuring that we clearly communicated what ‘enhancing public access’ means, and why it’s so important for current and future generations of people who want to enjoy the great outdoors. This involved getting across four major themes in a very short time:

• Linking communities – developing and extending the path network to provide vital links between homes and communities, routes to the local shops, the pub, transport hubs and local amenities.

• Improving safety – enhancing the local path network by providing safer routes through fields and forests, taking vulnerable road users off busy roads and away from traffic.

• Making walking easier – joining up paths to make them more useful for reaching places of interest and provide a greater variety of longer routes.

• Making existing paths more accessible – removing the obstacles that stop walks, especially for those less physically able, allowing even more people to be able to get out and enjoy the countryside.

The issue of enhancing public access is key to the Ramblers’ mission, so we hope that the animation and shareable graphics will be relevant and usable beyond our immediate lobbying on the Agriculture Bill.

How it went

Our motion content team created a short animation to engage and mobilise support using digital 2D animation techniques. We used Adobe Illustrator to storyboard and Adobe After Effects to bring it to life.

Alongside the short animation, we also produced four short sections as individual videos and a collection of shareable graphics, all of which were easy to share on social media, and embed on websites and emails sent via Mailchimp, providing Ramblers with a plethora of options for reaching their target audiences via multiple channels, and tailoring the content presented to meet the specific concerns of each.

“From start to finish on this project it has been great to work with Manifesto. We were having trouble bringing to life an amendment to a bill which had so many different elements, so decided to get some help. The team at Manifesto understood the brief immediately, and showed a clear understanding of the issue. It was great to see the first drafts doing exactly what we wanted from this work, and the final product is just amazing. It’s an animation that distils what the Ramblers do, and is something we’ll be using beyond the life of this bill.” – Oliver Hicks-Pattison, Senior Campaigns and Engagement Officer, Ramblers

 

How this helps us on your project

Manifesto’s motion content team is hugely experienced in distilling complex messaging and asks into engaging, informative and inspiring animated content. With video production skills spanning a wide variety of formats and contexts, we can help you use video strategically to further your organisation’s reach and deepen your relationships with key audiences.