Water Safety Ireland
Client
Water Safety Ireland
Industry
Public Awareness
Year
Duration
2 Weeks
Project overview.
Water Safety Ireland is the statutory body responsible for promoting water safety and reducing drownings across Ireland. Ahead of the summer season, the organisation needed to drive registrations for its lifeguard training programmes and get more young people seriously considering lifeguarding as something worth doing.
Through a paid social and audio campaign, the initiative pulled in over 400 registrations and helped Water Safety Ireland reach the next generation of lifeguards before the season began.
Challenge.
Lifeguarding comes with real skills, recognised qualifications and genuine career potential. But most 18 to 25 year-olds either saw it as a casual summer job or hadn’t thought about it at all.
Water Safety Ireland needed to cut through in a crowded digital space, shift that perception, and get young people to actually take the next step and register for training. Not just awareness. Action.
Solution.
The campaign started with the audience, not the role.
Rather than leading with what lifeguarding is, the creative strategy focused on what young people already care about: their motivations, behaviours and sense of what’s worth their time. Short-form video assets brought to life the experiences and opportunities that come with qualifying, framing the role as something genuinely attainable and worth pursuing.
One creative strand leaned into responsibility and real-world experience. Another drew a pointed comparison between the hours required to qualify as a lifeguard and the hours people already spend on entertainment content. It was a deliberate challenge to the “I don’t have time” objection, grounded in behaviour the audience would immediately recognise.
Paid social ran alongside audio advertising to extend reach and make sure potential candidates encountered the campaign in more than one place. Creative was continuously tested and optimised so the strongest assets kept working harder, and retargeting converted interest into registrations.
Result.
403 registrations. Over 16,500 visits to the registration platform. Content that reached more than 338,000 people nationwide and racked up almost 1.5 million video views.
The campaign also generated more than 167,000 engagements across the period, a signal that audiences weren’t just seeing the content but responding to it. The 18 to 25 cohort performed strongest throughout, which validated both the insight and the creative direction from the start.
Water Safety Ireland went into summer with more qualified candidates in its pipeline and a meaningful shift in how the role was being perceived by exactly the audience it needed to reach.
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