Operation Black Vote (OBV)’s mission is to inspire BME (Black & Minority Ethnic) communities to engage with politics in order to address racial inequality.

The statistics speak for themselves -- 24% of BME’s are not registered to vote (rising to 50% for African Britons) compared to 8% of white Britons.

Continuous lobbying by OBV to get this issue on the agenda had failed to elicit interest. Our challenge was to create a PR platform that would give OBV a spotlight to make their voice heard.

We enlisted four influential black celebrities to back the campaign and created a series of arresting images and a film where we turned their skin colour white and ran with the line “If you’re not registered to vote, you’re take the colour out of Britain.”

We held a press event to announce the campaign, got the celebrities to tweet the images and set up interviews with national press.

The impact was immediate. Broadcast outlets including the BBC, Sky News, London Live and ITV featured the story on the same day. National newspapers picked it up, and the story continued to run over the next week, including in-depth TV debates featuring OBV leaders.

We ran bespoke executions in local media in areas where the BME vote could swing the result.

In all, 97,291,524 people saw the campaign. £2.196m worth of media coverage was generated in a week. The week of the Operation Black Vote campaign launch saw an unprecedented surge in voter registrations, with 56% more people registering than during the same week before the 2010 General Election.

31st March: Operation Black Vote approved “Taking the colour out of Britain” idea.

1st April: Rankin signed up to the campaign.

3rd April: David Harewood, Sol Campbell, Tinie Tempah and Ade Adepitan confirmed to take part in the campaign. Celebrities agree to tweet their images and speak to national press as part of their involvement.

15th April: Press launch. Sky News, ITV, BBC, Channel 4, The Guardian, The Independent, The Voice and The Press Association are all there in numbers.

15th April: 11.30am: Celebrities tweet images.

15th April: 13:30pm: The campaign trends on Twitter. We make national headlines online and the broadcast evening news bulletins.

16th-24th April: The story makes national newspapers including the Guardian, the Independent, the Sun and the Daily Mail.

20th April: Posters go up in 100 marginal seat locations.

20th April: Regional media outreach begins, with individual executions targeted to local swing seat towns.

97,291,524 people saw the campaign.

£2.196m worth of media coverage was generated in a week.

The campaign trended on Twitter on launch day and had 9,693 mentions.

The week of the Operation Black Vote campaign launch saw an unprecedented surge in voter registrations, with 56% more people registering than during the same week before the 2010 General Election.