Live Brief – Week 2

This week, we held our first meeting as a group.  As we are located in different parts of the UK and in the world, we will be using a webinar format to hold our meetings which we agreed will need to be on a weekly basis.  Our aim for the first meeting was to start with some initial brainstorming and agreeing on our next steps as a group. 

We began by discussing what we had observed in the brief and identified these key points:

• Headway East London are looking for an online campaign
• The campaign is to be utilised during Brain Injury Awareness Week in May 2020
• The aim of the campaign is to raise awareness about brain injury
• Important areas are the hidden aspects of brain injury, the fact that it is unique for each individual, and the impact it has on identity.

As a group we were clear that we wanted to keep our campaign positive and focus on the strong sense of community and encouragement that we observed about Headway East London during the brief and by looking at their website.  We discussed some of the activities and projects that members of Headway are involved in, art exhibitions, writing projects, music groups, cooking and food events, gardening and youth projects.  These all reflect the tremendous sense of community and empowerment that is integral to Headway East London, while also showing the diversity of its members. 

We came up with a number of different ideas during the brainstorming session, including the idea of creating a video alongside photographs to create a striking online campaign.  We discussed the potential of a video done on location, interviews with members, incorporating their artwork and music into videos and photographs, and even including family members.  It was it agreed that we needed to contact the organisation first to discuss whether it was possible to have members participate in our campaign and for us to work on location. 

It was a full session and very productive with great ideas coming forward.  We rounded off with clear action points for each one of us for the week ahead – these included me doing research on their use of social media, while other team members were to research past campaigns, what other similar organisations have done, potential audiences and various other planning tasks.  I am pleased with the outcome of our first meeting and look forward to seeing what we come up with.