What we've done

Bin It. Don’t Flush It! Campaign

THE CHALLENGE
Create a Yorkshire Water character, viral and campaign tagline to help bring awareness to the regional problem of households and businesses putting items into their drainage and causing flooding issues and damage.

OUR RESPONSE
To prompt and change customer behaviour, we felt a more humorous approach would appeal to a wider audience and be the most effective way to tackle this serious issue and bring it to life.  So, we designed and developed an animated character called Numptee, to interact with and educate Yorkshire Water’s customers in a fun and engaging way.

Using Numptee, we created a viral animation based around a series of short comedy scenes to raise awareness about the perils of putting the wrong things down the drain.  We supported the viral with the campaign tagline ‘Bin It. Don’t Flush It!’, a brand design and also provided guidelines on how Numptee could be used across a number of other different disciplines and communication channels.

Four months into the campaign we produced the ‘Five Days of Numptee Christmas’ viral to reinforce the message that disposing of items incorrectly down the drain could cause blockages and flooding.
 
THE RESULT
Since the launch of the ‘Bin It. Don’t Flush It!’ campaign, there have been over 8,500 requests for absorbent sponges, known as Fattraps, requested as an alternative to flushing cooking waste down the toilet and the number of blockages across the region has decreased by 19%.

Numptee has become a huge hit with Yorkshire Water customers, receiving over 18,255 views on YouTube and 30,414 hits to the how to prevent sewer flooding advice pages on the Yorkshire Water website.  Used across a number of different communication channels, the animated star has even made it to the big screen, featuring across eight cinemas in Yorkshire and at Bradford Animation Festival.