Think Before You Dial: a geo-targeted mobile and social campaign moving non-emergency crime reporting online across two UK force territories — population-scale behaviour change, delivered through precision digital channels.
Thames Valley Police and Hampshire Constabulary came to us together with a genuinely public-interest brief: move non-emergency crime reporting online, take the pressure off 999 and 101 call handling, and free police resource for real emergencies.
Think Before You Dial had to land with several million residents across two separate force territories — establishing that online reporting existed, that it was credible, and that trained staff, not a bot, sat behind it.
Behaviour-change work is a different discipline from commercial media. There's no funnel, no cart, no conversion event in the usual sense — success means shifting what a whole population knows and does, which demands different creative and different targeting logic.
The message also had to earn attention in feeds engineered to bury public-service messaging — and land consistently across two forces, each with its own branding.
Mobile advertising and paid social carried the campaign — chosen for their ability to hit specific geographic boundaries with high frequency. Both territories were geo-targeted to postcode level, with creative adapted to each force's own messaging and branding.
On mobile, contextually targeted display ran across news, sport and lifestyle apps — the places residents already encounter local information. On social, Facebook and Instagram carried the load, with Instagram Stories proving especially effective by sitting natively inside content streams.
Creative was engineered for the first two seconds: static and video formats that communicated the message before the scroll, with a deliberately low-friction call to action — real people handle this, one click to start.
Over six weeks the campaign delivered more than 4 million impressions and 48,800 unique clickthroughs to the reporting pages across the two territories. Instagram reach rose 60% against the preceding six weeks, and Hampshire Constabulary's Facebook reach hit 1.55 million — up 35%.
The lesson travels: public sector communications can achieve population-scale behaviour change through precision digital channels, without broadcast budgets — exactly the approach we bring to public sector and social-impact briefs in Canada.