The Good Side is an insight, strategy and creative studio.
We unpack cultural complexity and set fresh directions.
We give trusted guidance in changing times.
We humanise audiences and navigate issues.
We craft strategies and stories for impact.
We are plugged into change at ground level, worldwide.
We work with leading and emerging organisations to understand the world and make things happen.
We created a six-month digital research community to capture young men’s personal lives and intimate thoughts. Mining a rich seam of user generated content and survey data, we delved deeply into their behaviours and attitudes, surfacing a wealth of insight. From this deep understanding we crafted a behaviour and social change strategy, centred on harnessing the power of social media to effect change.
Our insight and strategy drove media interventions in UK, Canada and Australia. In the UK, our briefing film mobilised top YouTube influencers to create 16 films that attracted over 10 million views and delivered proven positive behaviour change outcomes, an in award winning campaign. In Canada, almost 2.5 million men engaged with The Mental Game, a new multimedia format linking sports to mental resilience, with proven impact on self care habits. Australia campaign coming soon…
Participatory qualitative research laid bare the realities of LGBTQIA+ travel experiences, and brought travellers in to co-design booking.com’s internal and external change strategies.
Our work reshaped Booking.com’s internal strategy and Travel Proud partner community, and was featured as a keynote at the ESOMAR 2020 Client Summit.
A month-long ethnographic immersion and documentary film production, guided by a literature review and expert interviews and backed up with a quantitative survey. We workshopped insights and conclusions with The Kays Foundation, the Kenyan government and NGO stakeholders to ensure outputs were owned and co-created with people who could act on them. An interactive report to accompany the documentary film helped bring all of the thinking together, and live on beyond the project.
Through a series of stakeholder sessions and workshops we secured commitments from key ECD donors to revise their funding strategies to focus on designing for caregiver’s needs - representing over $10m in investment, mainly for mothers. Our film has become a key training tool for ECD programme design workshops, and is used as a case study for the Dignified Storytelling Alliance.
We partnered with MLS to fuel a multi-channel communications strategy aimed at inspiring engagement with Unilever and UK FCDO’s TRANSFORM programme. Through place-based ethnographic research and systems mapping, we uncovered the human stories and social impact that TRANSFORM social enterprises were making across East Africa and Bangladesh, and the benefit those organisations gained from working with Unilever teams on sales and marketing strategy.
Our storytelling, photography and evaluation content served to position TRANSFORM as a leading example of a public private partnership, encouraging and equipping other partners to replicate and invest in the model. Since the engagement strategy, many more partners have joined TRANSFORM, including Microsoft, Acumen, LinkedIn and GSMA.
We used our behavioural design process to explore consumer attitudes and behaviours around sustainability, informing campaign strategies to promote reusable coffee cup use. Through ethnography, user diaries, industry interviews, cultural and social media analysis we unpacked the contemporary sustainability movement, and identified narratives and intervention sites to help shift behaviours.
Adopting decision science levers and user personas from our research, we wrote creative briefs for agencies tasked with developing campaign ideas. Regional trial campaigns were launched in Manchester, Bristol and Leeds based on our behavioural insights.
WaterAid asked us to explore ways to influence the Johnson administration in order to achieve maximum impact. We designed a systems mapping approach to understand contemporary political influence and workshop strategic solutions. Through interviews with high level decision makers, political strategists, media linchpins and opinion leaders, an analysis of successful influencing campaigns and a network mapping process we were able to identify key opportunities and relationships for WaterAid, and propose narrative and strategic approaches to reach the heart of government.
Our network mapping and communications strategy has kick-started a new organisational approach to building influencing strategies within WaterAid.
This six-week engagement brought together some influential Ambassadors from the community and a group of energised and enthusiastic V&A staff for an immersive workshop to get a better understanding of this exciting and underserved audience. We used the rich insight surfaced from the difficult conversations on the night to craft a creative strategy that could spark change for the museum; mapping out a journey towards becoming a more inclusive and welcoming space for non-white audiences starting with the campaign for its upcoming Africa Fashion exhibit.
The work is currently being fed into the campaign strategy for the Africa Fashion exhibit; with a second phase with the Ambassadors being planned to continue to build on the insight and continue the museum’s change journey.
We identified a core British audience who have disengaged from supporting international development – a group we labelled Conscientious Cynics – to robustly understand their misgivings and stay myopically audience-focused with our campaign output.
Uniting a core group of specialist partner agencies across branding, creative, media and PR, we co-created a sector-wide brand and narrative, campaign film and **website **- reframing aid as help.
Set up as a live ‘test and learn’ experiment in cultural innovation, we delivered a full campaign analysis with clear sector recommendations to deepen the story further and reverse the decades of decline in public support.
And, crucially, we saw a significant uplift in positive views of international aid and aid organisations.
We designed a cultural strategy process to surface fresh insight and drive creative development. We immersed ourselves in memorial behaviours, learned from lived experience and explored existing social practices around death. We convened a creative community to help us invent new rituals and kick start a movement.
We discovered a rich and growing seam of death positivity at the margins of culture. From death cafés to immersive artwork, from memorial skate parks to nature therapy, death is having a moment in popular culture - and the time felt right to build a wider movement.
We soaked up a raft of inspiration from the diverse people we met as part of our research journey, and brought this to life in an insight film - telling stories of love, loss, acts of death positivity and remembrance. The film became a tool to engage partners as we crafted cultural strategy.
We collaborated with inspiring people across the UK who had experienced loss and turned it into a sense of purpose. The beautiful films, 1 hero and 7 personal stories, showed a diverse range of people and experiences, capturing the bittersweet nature of remembrance and driving social and PR engagement.
We created a new moment in the cultural calendar, instilling a new behaviour in the public consciousness. Our campaign invited people to make time to pause, reflect and celebrate someone they’ve loved and lost. We modelled ways in which they invokes their memories of loved ones, in a way that resonated personally, and to share those actions.
We helped make death more approachable by shifting the energy from loss and grief to embrace celebration and joy and we look forward to watching this important day grow in strength and support.
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Stories show us what we share in common and what makes us unique. Through emotional connection we can shift beliefs and find pathways to change. From award-winning impact documentaries to explainers, here are a few of our films.
HDT: A Better Place Trailer
Celebration Day
We The Helpers
Movember: UK YouTubers
HDT: Defending Dignity
Celebration Day - River Medway
Global Witness: Who's in the room?
Kays: Mama Kwanza
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HDT: A Wake Up Call
Reform53: Christine
