Objective

Now:Pensions is a pension fund for non-associated employers. It ran a campaign on a real but almost unexplainable problem: because of the way pension tax relief is administered, some of the lowest-paid workers in the country miss out on a Government top-up that better-paid colleagues receive automatically.

The campaign had a petition. What it did not have was a way to explain the mechanism fast enough that anyone would still be listening by the time they were asked to sign. The brief was to solve that in a single short film.

Creative response

• A script written to the mechanism. Explaining how the current pension setup works, and how it should change so low earners do not miss the Government top-up.
• A storyboard agreed before production. The cheapest place to fix an explanation is before anything is animated.
• 2D animation. Chosen specifically to explain the facts simply, showing money moving rather than describing it.
• One call to action. The film existed to drive signatures to the petition; nothing else competed with that ask.
• Published to YouTube. Hosted openly so the campaign could point at it from anywhere.

Results

2D, animation format, chosen to make the tax-relief gap simple to follow

CLOSED EARLY, petition 261267 closed on dissolution, 6 November 2019

The petition is on the public record as UK Parliament petition 261267. It opened on 14 June 2019 and closed on 6 November 2019 with 1,350 signatures, against the 10,000 needed to oblige a Government response. It closed early because Parliament dissolved for the December 2019 general election, rather than running its full course.

The work