soho

Soho Angels

The Soho Angels is a night-time safety initiative created by Westminster City Council in partnership with the LGBT Foundation. The Angels patrol the streets of Soho on Friday and Saturday nights helping people who are feeling unwell, who have fallen victim to crime, or need assistance in some other way.
The service does not replace essential services: it is designed to support them. Quite often an early intervention can stop a problem escalating and reduce the need for a 999 call or A&E admission.
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The creative idea was to create a non-hectoring campaign encouraging people to enjoy a night out in Soho but to know whatever might happen, the Angels are there to help. We also wanted to inform them of the services that The Night Hub, the Soho Angel’s base, could offer them.
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tweets

1,200

Tweets about the campaign in the first 5 months
media

95

Mentions in the media on day of campaign launch
target

150

%

Of the initial volunteer target achieved
The initiative was launched with a recruitment campaign to encourage people to volunteer to be part of the service, followed by an awareness campaign, to let revellers know that that the Angels were there to help.
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The campaign carried the line ‘End The Night Right’, which was also used as a social media hashtag. We used neon signs, part of Soho’s night-time landscape to carry the messages: making the posters impactful as well as informative. Social media was a big part of telling the story and we encouraged organisations and individuals in Soho to post and repost our stories and their own.
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St John Ambulance, Drinkaware, Metropolitan Police, and the London Ambulance Service all partnered with the initiative to help deliver the project. After the exposure to the idea, TfL agreed to donate media to help run the campaign. All though initially a Soho service, it has been so successful that there are plans to expand the service to the rest of the West End and beyond.
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The campaign was a success and greeted very positively by Soho businesses and the general public alike. TfL liked the campaign and offered media spaces for free with stations close to Soho.

 In the initial recruitment phase, we generated enough applications for the training and deployment of 60 volunteers.

 The Campaign garnered nearly 100 mentions in the days following its launch across media channels including TV, radio and online news.The launch ‘proper’ a couple of months later generated another media splash with as many as 37 media mentions in one day. The most exciting news coverage included television features on ITV and BBC, as well as pieces in Daily Mail, Daily Express and Metro publications.

 The campaign recently won Best Public Sector Campaign at the inaugural Creative Moment Awards 2019