No Knives
Better Lives

Social cause, social content

NKBL is a youth-focused charity that aims to reduce youth violence in Scotland. With limited budget and assets, the brief required some creative workarounds to target hard-to-reach Millennial and Gen-Z audiences on both Instagram and TikTok.

Client: No Knives Better Lives

Services: Design, retouching, video

Agency: Sunshine, Employed (link)

Year: 2018-2022

Social media mockups showing content for No Knives Better Lives. The Instagram grid and examples are shown, including an image saying keep the streets safe.

Retouchy subjects

A small team with big ambitions, NKBL did not have a library of assets at its disposal. That’s where retouching and art direction came into play – reworking free stock imagery into content that was on brand (before AI made this easier!). Use the sliders below to peep the before and afters.

An unedited, close-up photo of a T-shirt label. A retouched image of the same photo of a T-shirt label, with text added: Labels are for clothing, not for people.
An unedited image of someone standing on tarmac with a yellow arrow. A retouched image of the same person standing on tarmac, with no wrong path edited into a bright yellow arrow.
An unedited photo of a building in Glasgow at night, with fairy lights. A retouched image of the same building in Glasgow at night, with No Knives Better Lives edited like a projection onto the building.
An unedited photo of a lightbox on a dark street, with the original text saying less is more. A retouched image of the same lightbox, now saying keep the streets safe". It has NKBL in chalk edited onto the sidewalk.

The 'real' appeal & interactive stories

In addition to delivering a carefully crafted Instagram feed, the NKBL campaign benefited from ‘real’ images of young Scots – through a careful mix of stock image art direction and a single image bank. 

Interactive stories were also include, putting the target audience in the ‘bystander’ position, having to make their own choices.

Examples of interactive Instagram Stories and how the content brought young Scottish people into the art direction.

High impact vertical ads

Responding to where the youth demographic were browsing, later briefs sought to capitalise on the popularity of vertical video. In turn, I prepared a series of ads for Stories and TikTok, including editing and copy. Check out some of the videos below!

Collaborations

This was another client assigned to me whilst I was at Sunshine, the social media agency. I worked with an account manager, copywriter and social media team split between strategy and community management.

Agency results

  • Over 10K organic followers
  • Avg. 28.7K annual engagements
  • 102K ad views on TikTok
  • 1M cross-channel reach

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