Social Work In the news! Week 3: Re-branding Social Work

I recently wrote a somewhat rambling and verbose post about, among other things, what I saw as the difference between social work in the U.S. and in Great Britain, at least as seen in the media. Here's an interesting follow-up to that - a story in the Guardian about new advertisements in the U.K. to boost the the public image of social work, and to get new recruits:

The aim is to push the idea that social workers are often the "voice" of people in vulnerable situations.

"We hope to attract a new wave of talent to work in the profession and change public perceptions," said Karen Smalley, head of the department's marketing division. "Social workers help give a voice to many people across all ages and situations and we want to position social work as a career of choice."

The ad (click here to see it) starts a bunch of apparently famous people (I don't recognize them) acting as "clients," with other voices dubbed over. The campaign theme is "Help give them a voice." You can see the video at the link above.

It seems like a good enough campaign - the snippets of people's lives were pretty intense. I was a bit confused about the voices and the images - was the audio actual recordings actual clients recorded? Or other actors? What is the meaning of having them dubbed over video of the stars? Who is giving them a voice? The celebrities are there, but they are giving them a face, not a voice...

Am I over-thinking this? It would probably have made more sense to me if it included stars that I was actually familiar with. Is the unconscious message that as a social worker you get to work with movie stars?

It is hard to imagine a campaign to boost the perception of social workers in the U.S. - who has money and the motivation to do it? The closest thing I can think of is the ACS-recruitment campaign that ran a while back on New York City subways (no stars there though).

What do readers think? Is this an effective campaign? Do we give voice to vulnerable populations? And is that something that would attract you to the field?