The
Smashing Silly Stereotypes campaign has been renamed and
re-launched as the Benefit to Society project.
The Benefit to Society project has been created to tackle the
stigma social housing tenants experience. ARCH is part of a
steering group with 11 other housing organisations who aim to
engage with tenants to gather their experiences and share their
positive stories digitally to a highly targeted audience.
Negative public attitudes and perceptions have an impact upon
social housing tenants and on public attitude to social housing.
This negative stereotyping is underpinned by a general lack of
understanding of the social housing tenant demographic. The Project
aims to change this, by understandingwhois most likely to hold
negative opinions and how they express them, directlychallengingthe
media and the public who are responsible for driving negative
stereotyping of social housing tenants and creating opportunities
formorepositive portrayals of social housing tenants in the
media.
Through qualitative and quantitative research techniques, the
Project will uncover the realities of social housing tenants being
stigmatised, aiming to identify the behaviours and attitudes
towards people that live in social housing compared to homeowners
and those that private rent.
Based on the research insight the project will run an
intervention campaign that will seek to deter the public from
negatively stereotyping social housing tenants and focussing on the
positive benefits people who live in social housing bring to their
communities.
Over the next year, the project will produce:
- A practical style guide distributed through the National Union
of Journalists (NUJ) and sent to media including the Daily Mail,
Channel four, Channel Five, The Sun, Huffington Post, Guardian, The
Mirror and Inside Housing - The guide is intended for journalists,
communication professionals and members of the public who are
seeking the appropriate and accurate language to use when writing
or talking about people living in social housing.
- A You Gov Research dataset that the public attitudes of social
housing tenants and a sense of what might change negative
views.
- An London School of Econimics research report exploring the
causes and impact of stigma
- A digital campaign to reach 2.1 million social media accounts
aimed at key demographics identified in the research report.
As well as the general public, the steering group believes that
the media, government and the social housing sector itself all need
to be challenged in the way they represent social housing
tenants.
The steering group are seeking a small number of new sponsoring
organisations to support this important work. They particularly
welcome council housing teams and ALMOs to take part, ensuring this
is a truly cross-sector initiative.
For more information on the project, please email Catherine
Little, campaign coordinator, at clittle@soha.co.uk.