Method in Motion were commissioned by the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Institute of Technology to produce content for a new digital platform to encourage young people into STEM careers.
GBSIoT: Inspiring Young People
Objective
Make STEM careers recognisable, aspirational, and achievable to young people across the region through creative content.
Our Proposal
Uncover the stories that turn information into inspiration and produce a variety of shareable content designed for the still-in-development platform, but easily adapted for marketing and social media purposes. Story-led films, focussing on real people, their motivations, challenges, experiences, achievements, and advice.
The Challenge
The content we produced needed to appeal to a young target audience and importantly those underrepresented in STEM and engineering fields. This included young women, people from ethnic minorities, and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. It was important that our audience saw themselves represented in the films and that contributors also reflect the diversity of the Great Birmingham and Solihull area.
Research
Our outreach plan was for our Community Manager to spend 15 days contacting GBSIoT stakeholders and institutions. Initial responses were very positive and 2 suitable contributors were quickly identified, but then things slowed down. The 15 days allocated enabled us to connect to organisations beyond the GBSIoT network, to more employers, schools, and skills organisations. All of our films needed to be delivered by the end of March 2023, ahead of the platform launch, so we had a clear deadline. Our Community Manager developed a questionnaire for contributors with a series of prompts about their role, background and educational pathway as well as more personal information about hobbies and advice they’d like to share. These questionnaires not only allowed us to share contributor profiles with the wider team, but eventually provided the information needed to put together contributor briefs for directors, and formed the basis of our ‘pathway’ films.
The Numbers
The research involved liaising with 77 organisations in total, shortlisting 28 contributors and selecting a final 14, who appeared across 27 unique pieces of content. A large part of the research involved not just identifying and in- terviewing fantastic contributors but also securing permission to film them at work, carrying out and explaining their usual roles. It also considered the wide variety of GBSIoT courses available and the many industries in which STEM/ Engineering roles are required. The films feature young engineering profes- sionals, graduate engineers, and apprentices. The industries covered include manufacturing, transport, aerospace and construction, and the roles range from transport planner to train technician, process engineer to quantity surveyor, systems safety engineer to aviation apprentice.
The Creative
We were keen for our contributors to lead the films but not in a way that would turn viewers off, so minimal talking heads. Key to the success of our films was getting each contributor to actually show us what they do at work, we wanted to show their passion for the role and for our contributors to get hands on and demonstrate their role. We wanted to show that our apprentices have real responsibilities and that being an apprentice doesn’t immediately mean that you’ll spend all day tidying up or making tea! We see 18 year old rail apprentice Avril under a train fixing things, 19 year old Brooke servicing plane engines! Even when the role was office based we got out and about with our contributors showing the real world results of their work and the impact it has the environment.
We also used animation to highlight the roles and course titles which meant there was more time to hear and see what they do day to day.
