The National Lottery is a British Institution, and like all institutions, can make the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Whatever your opinion about it, the incontrovertible fact is that since 1994 The Lottery has raised over £22 billion for Good Causes, and more than 300,000 grants have been given out, genuinely transforming the lives of individuals, groups and communities throughout Britain.

However, positive stories rarely make good copy, and so the National Lottery Promotions Unit and Kindred needed a way to engage Lottery players and the wider public in the Good Causes.

People play The Lottery to win and so awareness about the Good Causes benefiting from the game was not front of mind. What was needed was a way to engage the public and Lottery players, showing them how the funds from the National Lottery Good Causes have benefited their community and what they have achieved.

We created an intense period of campaign activity called Love UK. This ran for two weeks and aimed to associate Lottery-funded projects with things people love about the UK, bringing a sense of pride in the achievements made possible by money raised through the Lottery.

A range of creative tactics and novel media stunts were devised to create a buzz around the Love UK fortnight, including:

- surveys on what people loved most about the UK

- media photo calls at iconic locations

- ‘taxi ambassadors’ to harness the power of ‘word of mouth’

- Love UK branded Love Hearts handed out at Lottery-funded venues.

Results for the Love UK campaign 2007 included:

- Almost half of all UK adults reached through media coverage

- Over 20 items in the national media over two weeks

- 85 per cent of coverage favourable

- Two thirds of coverage delivering the key message: “The money that National Lottery players have raised has made the UK a better place to live”

- 8 per cent of people (over 4.8 million) remembering the Love UK campaign.