Greater Manchester Police.

While the PUP is on track to succeed at recruiting an additional 20,000 officers across the entire police force by March 2023, it faced a challenging final year and still needed to recruit an additional 6,500 officers by March 2023. As part of the PUP, GMP needed to recruit 1,300 officers to meet their uplift target before the end of 2022.

And all at a time when the labour market is changing, GMP’s ratio of applications to successful appointees averages at 1 in 10, and public trust and confidence in policing has been damaged in some areas.

Step forward Viva PR.

Our aim was to generate an increase in applications for GMP officer roles via the Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship (PCDA) and the Degree Holder Entry Programme (DHEP).

During the campaign, the Initial Police Learning and Development Programme (IPLDP) route also reopened for a short time to encourage people who did not have, nor did not want, a degree.

This is how we delivered the much-needed impact:

• Conducted focus groups to understand the appeal for new officers
• Researched the pinch-points of the recruitment process
• Designed a multi-audience campaign aligned to the national campaign narrative “be the difference”
• Related “be the difference” to the specific cultural and operational challenges faced by GMP
• Localised messaging so that people could identify the good they can bring
• Balanced the need to broaden reach with the need to retain diverse targeting
• Rewrote the content for website to ensure it answered questions posed by potential recruits
• Improved how GMP use staff as ambassadors
• Made better use of a range of owned, earned and paid channels to reach direct audiences and their influencers

The target was set – we wanted our multi-channel approach of social media, media partnerships and advertising to at least double weekly average application figures from 85 to 170, and therefore increase GMP website visitors by 25%, from 155,100 to 193,875.

Given the application process for the PCDA takes around 6-12 months on average, plus GMP’s ratio of applications to successful appointees averages at 1 in 10, there was no time to lose.

Within the first seven weeks of the campaign, the average number of applications almost trebled when compared to figures from the seven weeks before.

In the final two weeks of August, 924 applications were received in total – 451 applications w/c 15^th August, 473 w/c 22^nd August.

The results:

GMP’s original baseline of officers pre-uplift was 6,787 and their uplift target was 7,942, meaning 1,155 new officers needed to be recruited.

Thanks to the success of Viva’s recruitment campaign, it was agreed in October 2022 that the team would ‘overshoot’ the target to achieve a final total of 8,100 by March 2023.

If this overshoot is achieved, an additional 1,313 officers would be recruited to GMP overall, including an additional 150 to the original baseline figures. Without the overshoot it would be 1,163.

During the period Viva were working with the GMP comms team, GMP was also taken out of special measures.

Viva’s recruitment campaign for GMP saw:

• 232 weekly applications on average, an increase of 173%, in the first seven weeks of the campaign
• The target of doubling applications and increasing website visits by 25% was achieved by the end of September, with three months to spare before the application cut-off date
• 298 applications a week on average (up from 85 at the start of the campaign)
• 451 applications in w/c 21^st August, 473 the week after
• 28% increase in GMP website views (up from 155,100 to 198,906)