Thames Valley Police and Hampshire Constabulary jointly commissioned a digital campaign with a clear public interest objective: shift non-emergency crime reporting online, reducing pressure on the 999 and 101 call infrastructure and freeing up police resource for genuine emergencies.
The campaign — Think Before You Dial — needed to reach the general public across two distinct force territories, spanning a combined population of several million residents. It needed to explain that online reporting was available, credible and handled by experienced staff — not an automated system. And it needed to do all of this while competing for attention in a digital environment saturated with content.
This is a categorically different brief from a commercial campaign. There is no purchase funnel, no conversion optimisation in the traditional sense. The measure of success is attitude and behaviour change across a broad population — and that requires a different kind of creative and targeting approach.
The campaign ran across mobile advertising and paid social simultaneously — two channels selected for their ability to reach residents within specific geographic boundaries with high frequency and contextual relevance. Both Thames Valley and Hampshire territories were geo-targeted at postcode level, with creative adapted for each force's specific messaging and branding.
Mobile placement included contextually targeted display across news, sport and lifestyle apps — environments where users encounter information about their local area. Social placements ran across Facebook and Instagram, with Instagram Stories delivering particularly strong engagement, appearing natively within content streams rather than as intrusive interruptions.
Creative was built to work in the first two seconds — static and video formats designed to communicate the core message before a user could scroll past. The call to action was clear and low-friction: this is not an automated system, it is handled by real people, simply click to start.
The campaign delivered over 4 million impressions and 48,800 unique clickthroughs to the Think Before You Dial reporting pages across both force territories — a meaningful volume of residents actively engaging with the online reporting proposition.
Instagram reach increased by 60% during the campaign period compared to the preceding six weeks — a significant uplift that demonstrates the additive effect of paid social on organic reach for public sector accounts. Hampshire Constabulary saw Facebook page reach of 1.55 million during the campaign window, up 35% on the comparison period.
The campaign demonstrates that public sector communications can achieve genuine population-scale reach through precision digital channels — without broadcast budgets. Targeted mobile and social, executed well, can shift awareness and drive meaningful engagement with public interest messages at the scale that policing communications require.
Thames Valley Police · Social Impact & Awareness · UK
