World Wellbeing Movement

Governments the world over measure success through the monetary metric of GDP. But it’s a blinkered and outdated view, accounting only for an economic measure. Wellbeing, by contrast, takes a broader perspective and incorporates qualitative factors relating to the wider welfare of people.

Backed by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, The World Wellbeing Movement is on a mission to make wellbeing the overarching goal of Government, moving beyond GDP.

For this to happen, we first need to shift mindsets around wellbeing and make it matter to policymakers.

As part of Jack & Grace’s annual commitment to support impact driven organisations with pro-bono support, we partnered with the World Wellbeing Movement over six months to help communicate their mission to a wider audience and get people thinking differently.

With 22 days of pro-bono agency time, we developed the organisation’s first PR campaign: ‘The Happiness Poverty Line’. Working collaboratively with key stakeholders, Jack & Grace created the campaign strategy, key messaging and narrative, planned the media approach and curated the story – then delivered it.

Our aim was to create a compelling, relatable narrative for our campaign – removing the jargon and complexities often used when discussing wellbeing in a policy context and highlighting the disparity between what governments value as markers of societal success (GDP) and what citizens truly value (wellbeing).

To launch the campaign and coincide with the release of the World Happiness Report and International Day of Happiness, we developed and released the organisation’s inaugural ‘UK Wellbeing Report’* which revealed steep wellbeing inequalities across regions in the UK, as well as a poor wellbeing recovery since the pandemic. It defined those scoring lower than average for wellbeing (5 on a scale of 0-10) as living ‘below the Happiness Poverty Line”. The report is set to be updated annually.

Our media outreach secured one piece of national press coverage – published online, on X and Instagram with a reach of over 1.3million; 7 pieces of regional coverage including a 6-minute interview across BBC radio broadcasting and two national media briefings.