Shelter: Football Strategy

My Role
Creative Development & Strategy

Please note this creative is an early concept using AI to generate imagery.

Shelter want to raise awareness of the housing crisis amongst football fans but there is one big problem: football fans struggle to empathise with homelessness.

The majority of fans assume that homelessness only refers to people living on the streets and that they, themselves, must be to blame.

This presents a number of challenges;

Firstly, football fans do not understand the scale of the problem. They aren’t aware that homelessness affects all types of people, with various experiences. Football fans believe it’s not their problem and find the issue unrelatable believing it would never affect someone like themselves. And, finally, charitable causes needs to be close to the heart to prompt football fans.

To overcome these common misconceptions we needed a new approach that can resonate with football fans. We needed a powerful message that makes them think about the problem in a different way, one that’s emotive and one that they can sympathize with. A statistic that really makes you take notice. Like the devasting fact that almost 50% of homeless people in the UK are children.

Using this as the focus for the campaign combined with relatable football language I developed a creative concept that took well known football terms and constrasted them with the realities families face when being made homeless.