Danish Home Guard – Recruitment
The challenge
The Danish Home Guard is a voluntary organisation, established in 1949 as a national defence unit. During the Cold War, when the fear of nuclear holocaust and World War III played on Europeans’ minds, recruitment was not a problem. But when the Iron Curtain came down, the flow of volunteers began to slow. When the Danish Home Guard contacted us in 2006, the flow had become a trickle. And a voluntary army without volunteers will not survive for long.
Strategy and activation
The public image of the Danish Home Guard was that of an obsolete and useless organisation full of 'wannabe' commandos. Through research, we discovered that this image was based in no small part on the Home Guard’s failure to renew its unwritten contract with the people it was supposed to protect. A contract that was understood to exclusively entail military protection. For that reason, Kernel chose to focus our communication efforts on the many other services the Home Guard provides – search and rescue, environmental protection, natural disaster aid, etc. And we chose to use the Home Guard’s main asset to communicate this – its approximately 50,000 volunteers.
Execution and results
Kernel sent Home Guard volunteers on a tour of 23 major Danish cities to show the population what they do – and how they do it. These events, with demonstrations, show-and-tells and high-tech equipment, were supported by VIP sessions where experts on terrorism (a hot topic at the time) explained how the Home Guard could play a vital role in protecting the country from terrorist attacks. Fifty thousand pairs of eyes go a long way in monitoring sites that are under threat. Our strategy was successful – the events were covered by local media channels and visited by many thousands of visitors who went home and spread the word. Confidence in the Home Guard’s ability to perform its tasks rose dramatically and the number of volunteers increased.