Politicians were ignoring warnings of a crisis, so the Aged Care Association brought in reinforcements: the New Zealand public.
By 2040, it’s estimated Aotearoa will be home to 200,000 people aged 85 and older – a significant proportion of whom will be too frail to live at home.
But instead of creating more aged care beds, we’re losing them, the Aged Care Association says.
The association represents 93% of New Zealand’s aged residential care sector (more than 40,000 beds). Its members provide rest home, hospital, dementia and psychogeriatric care, as well as short-term care.
“Due to years of chronic underfunding, aged care facilities are closing down in alarming numbers and we’re short 1,200 nurses, who get better pay and conditions overseas and in the public health system,” it says.
“New Zealand is in the midst of an aged care crisis. Year after year, calls for a more sustainable funding model had fallen on deaf ears.”
This crisis affects us all, the association warns. It needed a campaign that would grab the attention of politicians and decision-makers, just before a general election.
“But after being routinely ignored, we changed tack and decided to reach them through the very people who were to decide their fate in a few weeks’ time: the NZ public. Strategically, we identified that public pressure around election time was our best chance of eliciting action.”
To show the scale of the problem, the Aged Care Association and its marketing partners used a visual metaphor: ‘The Domino Effect’, creating a life-size domino run made up of beds from a real, struggling aged care facility.
This was shared via a campaign across TV, OOH, social media and radio, along with robust PR that included mailing packs of dominos to journalists.
The campaign achieved a PR reach of 3.7 million New Zealanders, 74% of the entire country, across 46 pieces of unpaid media including 15-minute slots on prime time TV.
“But most importantly, after years of being routinely ignored, the Aged Care sector was the focus of five policy commitments by the incoming New Zealand coalition government, one of which specifically committed to investigating the funding model – which is the very cause of our impending crisis,” the Aged Care Association says.
“We cannot overstate how significant this is for the sector and the raft of passionate people and organisations that have been pushing for a result like this year after year.”
Judges’ comments
“Clever targeting, innovative thinking, and a brave approach to lobby the public and create a movement to influence the need for meaningful policy change. The judges would love to see how this approach can be built on to continually improve excellence in aged care support.”
This was first published in the 2024 September-October NZ Marketing Magazine issue. Subscribe here.
