#Iam20million

Convincing European leaders to focus on child poverty.

Context: Europe is leaving its most vulnerable children behind

Child poverty is a crisis facing all of Europe. In every European country, at least 10 percent — and in some countries, as high as 40 percent — of the children living there are at risk of poverty and social exclusion.

Poverty affects every aspect of a child’s life from the moment they are born. Children experiencing poverty suffer from a wide range of physical, emotional, and mental setbacks over the course of their entire lives. Worsened health, academic, and employment outcomes are much more likely to affect children raised in poverty.

As Europe pushes towards modernisation via its green and digital transitions as well as strategic autonomy efforts, it risks doing so at the expense of its 20 million children at risk of poverty and social exclusion. And in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, the situation is only getting worse.

Challenge: Centring child poverty in a critical election year

With the European Parliament elections coming in 2024, Save the Children Europe wanted to ensure that European leaders would prioritise child poverty alleviation. Save the Children Europe is a nonprofit non-governmental organisation (NGO) advocating for the well-being of children in the region.

Critical to Save the Children Europe’s 2024 strategy was the implementation of an annual Child Poverty Week: a pan-European initiative to raise awareness about the crisis and promote relief efforts. They needed a new narrative strategy and campaign slogan to ensure newly elected European leaders would participate and make child poverty alleviation a core goal both regionally and at the national levels.

Approach: Child poverty is pervasive, a priority, and a political choice

Save the Children Europe’s communications had primarily revolved around a moral, rights-based narrative. As they should — children have the right to poverty alleviation as human beings, and governments have a moral responsibility to act. Child poverty was depicted as a moral wrong with complex causes and expensive, long-term solutions.

But would this be enough to motivate newly elected leaders to act?

A narrative of urgency

The Savion Ray team believed that a more urgent story needed to be told. We drew attention to the fact that it is a pressing problem today. And not just in a handful of countries, but in every single EU member state. Drawing on Save the Children Europe’s extensive research and data, we focused the narrative into one of driving immediacy.

• Child poverty is pervasive: Child poverty is a pan-European crisis that affects every aspect of a child’s life.

• Child poverty is a priority: None of Europe’s political objectives will be fully realised if child poverty is allowed to persist. Poverty is a direct threat to the European project.

• Child poverty is a political choice: Child poverty can be solved if we act now. Effective National Action Plans will empower the European Child Guarantee to reduce and prevent child poverty in Europe.

The new narrative tells a clear story. Child poverty affects all of Europe, is a threat to all of Europe, and leaders can begin solving it today. With this narrative, Save the Children Europe can begin lobbying European leaders with focused messaging and action plans to alleviate child poverty.

Please Note: While Savion Ray collaborated with Save the Children Europe on the narrative strategy and slogan for their child poverty campaign, we did not produce the accompanying video. The video is a production of Save the Children Europe, reflecting their unique perspective and storytelling.

A slogan to inspire action

Save the Children Europe needed to channel this new narrative via a memorable, shareable slogan. From the start, we wanted the slogan to be rooted in data. And there was no better indication of the sheer scale of the problem than the number of children facing poverty and social exclusion in Europe. While working on this project, that number was 18 million.

But it’s not enough to simply share data. You must shape data into a compelling story. It was essential to humanise child poverty and drive home that it’s not just an abstract concept, but a tangible crisis affecting real people.

#Iam18million was the result of this creative direction. This powerful hashtag emphasises that poverty includes a massive population comprising a wide range of at-risk groups. And should the number of at-risk children increase, the hashtag could be adjusted accordingly, reflecting the increasing urgency of the crisis.

Unfortunately, this happened much sooner than we could have anticipated. Just days after wrapping the project in December 2023, Save the Children Europe informed us that the latest Eurostat findings showed that Europe now has 20 million at-risk children.

#Iam20millon — and hopefully soon, we will be much fewer.

Let’s get started