Oliver Clark

Reframing belonging at TfL by turning inclusion from a corporate message into a staff-defined experience of home.

CONTEXT

During my Stuart Ross Communications Internship at Transport for London (TfL), I developed an internal campaign concept to support the Mayor of London’s ‘You Are Loved and Wanted in London’ – a campaign focused on creating a more inclusive and welcoming city.

The challenge was to translate the Mayor’s city-wide message about belonging into something authentic and meaningful for TfL’s 28,000+ staff who work across stations, depots, offices, and other frontline roles.

Although the campaign wasn’t launched, the concept provided a hands-on opportunity to develop insights, shape strategy, and craft creative assets in a real environment.

THE BRIEF

Create an internal communications campaign to support the Mayor of London’s ‘You Are Loved and Wanted in London’ campaign to reinforce TfL as an organisation where every employee feels they belong.

The Campaign Needed To

• Support inclusion goals
• Engage a diverse workforce across roles
• Work across existing internal channels
• Encourage participation rather than passive awareness

My Role

• Insight development
• Campaign strategy and concept creation
• Naming and messaging
• Copywriting
• Activation planning
• Visual direction

STRATEGIC THOUGHT PROCESS

TfL sits at the heart of one of the most diverse cities in the world, with staff hailing from a wide range of cultures and identities. This campaign needed to reflect that in a way that didn’t feel stale, corporate, or top-down.

To anchor the campaign, I needed a symbol that universally represented belonging – and where better to start than home.

Home is a symbol of warmth, strength, and unity – but it’s deeply personal and richly unique to each person.

Rather than positioning TfL as ‘home’ – a framing that can feel overly corporate and disingenuous – the campaign used home as a metaphor, allowing employees to define its meaning for themselves.

The opportunity was to move belonging from something communicated to TfL staff into something created by them.

INSIGHT

You can tell people they belong, but they only believe it when they see themselves in the culture around them.

THE STRATEGIC IDEA

‘There’s No Place Like Home’

A staff-led campaign inviting employees to define what ‘home’ means to them, through moments, memories, and stories unique to their own experiences – not through corporate messaging.

STRATEGIC ROLE OF THE MESSAGE

By celebrating the range of ways home is experienced, the campaign shaped a sense of belonging and inclusion as something felt from within, not forced from above.

In doing so, belonging shifted from an eye-rolling corporate message into a visible culture shaped by employees themselves.

CREATIVE EXECUTION

PRINT

With 70% of staff based in operational roles with limited access to email and digital channels like Platform, print became the campaign’s primary distribution channel.

Posters carried the campaign across stations, depots, and offices, each reflecting a unique and personal interpretation of ‘home’, strengthening staff involvement.

By planting staff stories into everyday workspaces, belonging became something subtly and genuinely encountered, rather than enforced.

STAFF INTERVIEWS

If belonging comes from seeing your perspective reflected back at you, corporate instructions don’t cut it. Staff engage when stories come from peers they recognise and can relate to, rather than corporate voices.

Critically, interviews created a launchpad for storytelling. A relaxed living room setup outside TfL stations created the ideal space to share authentic conversations about identity and belonging.

Each interview would be distributed across internal channels like Viva Engage and adapted into more quotes for digital signage, allowing staff to remain at the campaign’s heart, whilst scaling it further.

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Home encompasses more than memories. It’s multisensory – and music is a universal connector of people.

A collaborative playlist allowed staff to contribute the sounds that represented ‘home’ to them, creating a diverse soundtrack shaped collectively by TfL staff. 

Rather than simply receiving messaging, staff actively contributed to the campaign, reinforcing a sense of belonging through collaboration, not just messaging.

STAFF PIN BADGES

Badges are a small, visible sign of participation, allowing belonging to be expressed in everyday workspaces.

The badges ultimately turned belonging from a message into a physical symbol that staff could recognise and relate to.

WIDER CHANNEL CONSIDERATIONS

To amplify the campaign’s visibility and effectiveness, content would be shared across internal news articles, blogs, and Viva Engage, ensuring a sense of belonging went from awareness to engagement in a sustained way.

INTENDED IMPACT

‘There’s No Place Like Home’ aimed to translate a corporate message into an authentically felt staff experience by broadening diverse identities and encouraging participation at TfL.