Homeless people cannot vote, as they aren't included in the census. Consequently, they don’t have full citizenship. And because of that, most politicians on the campaign trail do not pay much attention to their needs and requests.

Arrels Fundació proposed the following strategic communication brief and objectives for the Barcelona 2023 municipal elections:

. To demand equal voting rights and denounce the lack of democratic and social rights for homeless people

. To take advantage of the media coverage and debate surrounding the elections to raise the visibility of the cause of them

. To influence candidates running for mayor to consider and address the problems of people who live in the street

To highlight homeless people’s lack of democratic and social rights, the NGO Arrels Fundació created a symbolic political party with people who had lived on the streets. They included concrete proposals for how homeless people’s rights could be recovered if all parties and administrations got involved.

To draw attention to the NGO party, the real election posters of the four candidates most likely to win, according to the polls, were recreated. In these versions of the posters and of the campaign spot, the candidates were depicted as homeless people. The original campaign slogans were also rewritten to highlight the issue.

The candidates’ photos were produced using Artificial Intelligence based on proprietary models trained with the data of each political personality.

The incentive behind this campaign was the following: there are more than 4,800 people in Barcelona who cannot vote or stand for public office because they are homeless.

The key message of the campaign was to denounce and highlight the fact that homeless people are effectively excluded from the right to full citizenship: they cannot stand in elections, make political proposals or influence society. Nor do they have the right to vote.

The main target groups were the media, political parties, institutional actors, KOLs and the general public.

To publicise the campaign, we organised a press conference, distributed a press release adapted to different local, regional, specialised and general media, arranged interviews and disseminated the campaign materials through the Arrels Fundació’s social networks and through the help of its various collaborators.

The campaign was launched three days after the first election posters for the Barcelona municipal elections were put up. It lasted as long as the election campaign itself, from 16 to 28 May 2023.

To publicise the campaign, we organised a press conference to present the symbolic political party of the NGO Arrels Foundation, where we spoke to people who had lived on the streets to hear their ideas on how homeless people's rights could be restored if all parties and administrations got involved.

We also recreated the real posters of the four candidates most likely to win according to the polls, presented a press release to the media, conducted a series of interviews with NGO spokespeople and disseminated everything through social media.

This has been the most successful and profitable action in Arrels’ history. Not only in terms of impact and communicative value, but also in terms of real and political response.

The results were:

€1,020,022 earned media value

+ 739M free advertising impacts

89% general media publications + 11% specialised media publications

35% in national media publications + 51% in local & regional media publications + 12% in other regional media publications (excluding Catalonia) + 2% in international media publications

92% positive sentiment

83% Barcelona population reached

€0 paid media support

A local action with thousands of mentions in national media and social media, as well as in radio, television and newspaper interviews.

All the results of this campaign were achieved without having paid a single euro in any advertising space.

A local PR campaign attracted the attention of the country's main media publications (El Mundo, El País, Cadena SER, Cope, Infobae, ABC, 20 Minutos, ABC, EFE, Europa Press, among others).