Unlocked Graduates is a charity that recruits, trains and challenges outstanding graduates to lead prisoner rehabilitation. The aim is to create high-performing leaders who will break cycles of reoffending in prisons and throughout society. To do this, it needed an outstanding campaign that would secure 3,000 quality applicants, despite the brand being relatively unknown. Furthermore, the media portrayal of the prison service often puts potential graduates off.

A creative concept of ‘It’s not for you’ intended to create intrigue around a career working in prisons, despite the practical challenges of not being able to show inside their future place of employment. Arresting visuals including cartoons offered statements such as ‘A career that’ll shock granny’ were the first phase of the campaign, withholding some information to create intrigue. The second phase, ‘educate’, began to deliver details across social platforms and programmatic ads.

Finally, ‘excite’ was designed to drive people to the application stage, offering a positive spin on the previous headlines and now referencing the prison officer role, reframing the question: ‘Is it for you?’ Unlocked took a risk by decreasing job board spend, and this dramatically reduced cost per application while still achieving three times more impressions than its target, and four times more than the previous year. The organisation exceeded its application target of 3,000, with graduates loving the visuals and the CEO of Unlocked praising Pink Squid for challenging it to do something different.