Our School, Our Community, Our World (County Tyrone)

Getting The Vote Out

Organising a Big Lottery Fund People’s Millions campaign is like good comedy… it’s all about timing.

St Peter’s Primary in Plumbridge, Co Tyrone, might only have 90 pupils, but it galvanised thousands of votes to bag one of the UK’s biggest ever People’s Millions poll and scoop its share of this year’s £250,000 prize pot.

Run in conjunction with UTV and the Daily Mirror, the 2009 event gave £50,000 each to five local groups during the week-long event, each group having just a few hours on its competition day to drum up as many telephone votes as possible.

“Our People’s Millions win was absolutely fantastic – people are still talking about it!” We knew we’d worked hard to bag this prize but I think even we were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the support and goodwill we had from the whole community,” says headmaster Pearse O’Kane, who employed the simple – but effective – principle of pyramid selling to kick start the campaign.

“What makes it even more amazing is the fact we started with a core of just 20 people who pledged their votes. They then each enlisted 20 more – and so on and so on – it was that simple… to begin with anyway.”

Gobsmacked

And if by this stage you’d managed to slip through the net, there were always the local bus drivers. “We even got permission from Translink for drivers to call out the voting line number to remind passengers to phone in!” says Mr Kane.

And should your iPod have drowned out the bus driver, then St Peter’s campaigners would be sure to enlist you at your destination, armed with flyers in the streets of towns and villages within a 20-mile radius of Plumbridge for nine hours on the day of the vote.

In a show of good sportsmanship, the school even hatched a deal with competitor Holy Trinity Primary School, Cookstown, to pledge each other 1,000 votes. “There was no escape!” laughs Mr O’Kane, who admits even he was ‘gobsmacked’ by the poll-busting 21,500 votes they banked followed by the winner’s £50,000.

“When we look back at it now, even we can hardly believe it. Of course the money is absolutely fantastic, but just as important the campaign brought out the goodwill in our community. It just goes to show what people can do when they pull together.”