Having already raised over £30,000 to install over 100 new mini laundrettes in schools to tackle hygiene poverty the since 2020, smol set out to make an even greater impact in 2024.

Fanclub was tasked with delivering an activism-led campaign to help drive broader action in  tackling hygiene poverty, and elevate the brand’s partnership with The Hygiene Bank.

We set out to help smol lead the charge to encourage change at a governmental level, with the objective to get the government to include hygiene poverty on the agenda of its newly-announced Child Poverty Strategy.

To shine a light on the scale of the issue, we spoke to school staff, revealing how hygiene poverty has changed in the past year, how it is impacting children and staff themselves, and how much staff are spending of their own money to help. We then took our findings to the teacher’s union, NASUWT, who came on board to back our campaign.  

Using the research findings, alongside spokespeople from smol, The Hygiene Bank and the NASUWT, we spoke directly to the chairs of the Child Poverty Strategy taskforce, outside Westminster, with a giant washing line with 40 pieces of laundry - each representing £1m of money teachers spend out of their own pocket every year on keeping their pupils clean - (£40m collectively to be precise).

We also created a template letter, hosted on the smol website, which could be used by citizens to write to their MP to do the same.

The activity drove 6,000 people to the campaign landing page, and over 1,600 pieces of coverage. Of which, there were 35 one-to-one broadcast interviews with our campaign spokespeople, and 21 pieces of print coverage - reaching titles including the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, Sky News, LBC, BBC, Virgin Radio, Capital, Heart and the Evening Standard. 

The campaign elicited a response from the Government which acknowledged the issue with a promise to listen to frontline staff as part of their Child Poverty Taskforce. But that’s not all. The campaign reached the desk of former prime minister Gordon Brown, the guiding force behind child poverty charity Multibanks who adopted our research and included it as proof points in its Christmas 2024 campaign to further highlight the effects of hygiene poverty on British school children.