Thank You Day 2022
On Sunday 5th June, the last day of the Jubilee celebrations, we came together to build Thank You Day. A record breaking 17.3million people took part across the Jubilee weekend, including 8.7million people attending Thank You Day events across the UK.
June 2022 was an incredible month for the UK, with a rich and diverse range of community events taking place. Her Majesty the Queen’s Jubilee weekend provided the UK with a great opportunity to maximise social connection and for local communities to come together, with 8.7 million people taking part on Thank You Day, the last day of the Jubilee weekend. Millions more took part in the day through social media, where #ThankYouDay was trending and a viral video with over 29 million views on Tik Tok.
Millions of people came together to build Thank You Day through Big Jubilee Lunches, compete and eat sessions, sing-a-longs, faith events and much more. With one single aim to help us work towards building kinder, closer and more connected communities.
In 2021 we wanted to capture the community spirit that we saw during the Covid 19 lockdown. As we went into 2022 the UK was facing a cost of living crisis against a backdrop of political polarisation, increased levels of loneliness and mental health issues.
Communities across the UK were looking for something to look forward to and the last day of the Jubilee celebrations was the perfect time to have Thank You Day, using thankfulness as a means to stimulate social connection. An opportunity for everyone to meet and get to know each other, regardless of their ages, politics and backgrounds.
Charities, local community groups, businesses, media outlets, organisations big and small all pushed out Thank You Day in different ways, with different activities to appeal to as many different audiences as possible. All sectors were united in working hard to ensure that everyone across the UK was invited to the biggest party ever!
On the Day
Thousands of events took place as groups and organisations hosted Thank You Day events across the UK, even the weather played its part and the rain kept at bay in most places!
Through the support of key organisations like the FA, Parkrun UK, Rotary, Street Games, Together with Music, Good Beer Co, Faith Communities, Royal Voluntary Service, Eden Project Communities and many more we saw hundreds of Thank You Day events across the UK.
But the success was owned by the local community activists as much as the big organisations. Julie Siddiqi from Slough helped to arrange a faith walk and faith events, Gavin McKenna from Reach Every Generation arranged a football match and Saira Mir-Begum arranged a Thank You Day event for the local community, which included refugees and food bank users.
Big or small, everyone was encouraged to hold their event in the way that they felt would work best to connect the people in their community. Below is a snapshot of the impact they had:
Impact of the Day
Support for Thank You Day was incredible with thousands of events across the UK, many featuring across regional and national media. The three month campaign to Thank You Day itself saw 14,283 separate articles of Thank You Day across broadcast TV, radio and print media in every single region of the UK, including 12,782 social media articles. Together the articles stimulated over 740 million opportunities for people to hear about Thank You Day.
The success on the media channels was reflected on the ground too with 3.35 million people helping to organise a Thank You Day event, with 62% of people meeting someone from a different background and 61% feeling their area felt more united.
An amazing 33% said they would be more likely to volunteer and participation was particularly strong among young people, 30% of 18-24 year olds and 38% of 24-34 year olds.
The impact of the day and data findings are very encouraging and show there is a real appetite for opportunities to connect. They are also an indicator that national events like Thank You Day can help stimulate year round activity that connects people, helping us to create kinder, closer and more connected communities.
What we’ve learned
Thank You Day 2022 gave us an insight into what can be achieved when we use thankfulness to come together to build a day of connection but complacency is never an option and we know we have learnings to take from this journey to help us reach even more people next year.
Using a white-label brand (i.e. not /together branded), and a flexible theme of ‘Thank You’ helped inspire collective ownership of the day with both big brands and at a grassroots level. Being able to use the assets and brand as their own, and adopt ‘Thank You’ in whatever way felt relevant to them, meant we were able to reach many more members of the public with Thank You Day, and that it organically spread.
The strength of the together coalition is in the breadth and diversity of our partners. Through their expertise we were able to reach new audiences. They advised on different moments, methods and ideas to reach different groups across society. Whether it was engaging young people through Tik Tok to the campaign, creating assets that everyone could use or how best to create a lasting legacy (Knock, Name, Natter), we would not have been able to deliver Thank You Day without them.
We had a number different ‘launch moments’ based across different sectors which helped to maintain momentum and build a sense of excitement that inspired others to join the campaign, which helped us to reach more people and different audiences.
Thank You Day came with some wonderful opportunities – not all of which we were able to capitalise on due to the capacity of our coordinating charity, The Together Initiative. The charity will never need to have loads of capacity, as we’re here to embed social connection as part of culture and practice in the UK and inspire the coalition of partners to take the lead in delivery of campaigns. However, we know that a few extra pairs of hands could have increased impact massively.
The Thank You Day review shows how we built the day as a coalition, what went well and what we are learning from so we can make future Thank You Days even better.
Email us at info@together.org.uk, we would love you to read, question, learn and share your thoughts with us by or by @togethercoalit
