The Economist Educational Foundation
The Economist Educational Foundation wanted to raise awareness of their educational programme, Topical Talk – a set of fully-resourced lessons the charity provides free to schools to help students develop critical-thinking and communication skills through discussions on current affairs. We were brought in to help develop a news story that would gain meaningful coverage across national and education media. The activity needed to show the importance of teaching young people to understand the news and discuss it in a way that is not divisive or disrespectful.
“There is absolutely no way we would have achieved this level and quality of coverage without The Influence Crowd’s support.”Loretta Cooper
We were aware of the government’s manifesto commitment to lower the age of voting and understood its potential to drive the news agenda. With this in mind, we recommended commissioning a report into the thoughts and fears of the next generation of voters. Called ‘Vote Confident’ its main aim was to understand the concerns of today’s 10 to 17-year-olds. But it would also position The Economist Educational Foundation as a resource to help teachers upskill children to make more confident decisions. We suggested the results be released in the weeks before the 7th May 2026 local government elections, to generate maximum interest, as voting would be high on the news agenda at that time.
We understand the importance of an attention-grabbing headline, so worked closely with The Economist Educational Foundation to create both a questionnaire and final report that would deliver what was needed. This included suggestions for highly newsworthy topics such as cancel culture. With the results in hand, we created a hard-hitting release, lined up school case studies and charity spokespeople and targeted national, regional, education and youth media outlets.
We achieved 81 pieces of quality coverage in just a few weeks. Outlets that covered the story included Sky News (8.8 million followers), The Telegraph, and The Independent. It created a huge amount of discussion too, a key indicator that we hit the right note with the angle. A single Sky News Instagram post amassed 52k views and 100 comments alone. Downloads of the report reached over 400 and the research has been referenced in subsequent coverage post launch.
Scroll down for the full results and impact of this campaign 👇
81 pieces of coverage achieved, including significant pick-up across Sky News, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Economist and Teach Secondary amongst others.
9.4m total online coverage views 35.8k coverage views on social 26.2k coverage views on dark social (WhatsApp, IM)
658 total social shares
474 downloads to date
