#CleanForTheQueen gets less than sparkling reviews

March 10 2016

By @G_Parsons33

Published in Crisis

Last weekend was “Clean for the Queen”, Keep Britain Tidy’s three-day initiative to clear up litter across the country. The campaign encouraged local communities to clean up the streets in preparation for the Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations in June. Unsurprisingly, many were distinctly unimpressed by the message, which has been called “patronizing” and “cringeworthy”.

There have been 70,000 tweets mentioning the initiative over the past two weeks, sharing thousands of press articles, photos, and more. The campaign has been dubbed a #fail by many, but how much of a disaster was it really? We used the Visibrain media monitoring platform to see what people had to say about #CleanForTheQueen.

How did we do it?

We captured all Twitter data posted between February 24th and March 9th referring the the Clean for the Queen campaign or using the #CleanForTheQueen hashtag.

Scathing reviews from the press

Clean for the Queen’s PR struggle was the most obvious in the press. The top links shared in tweets about the initiative show that the campaign was hitting the news for all the wrong reasons.

The most shared link is for an article from New Statesman entitled: “The Clean for the Queen campaign is Tory Britain at its worst”, retweeted 1,430 times. In second place is an article from the Telegraph about the Queen’s staff striking over low pay.

The most-shared press articles about Clean for the Queen

The link to the campaign website cleanforthequeen.co.uk (edit march 2019 : link removed, the website doesn’t exist anymore) was only shared 550 times, coming in fifth place.

A backlash on Twitter that drowned out positive comments

Using a subject as divisive as the monarchy to encourage people to pick up litter was always going to be a risky strategy, especially when you take into account the recent cuts to council budgets for rubbish collection. People took to Twitter in their thousands to express their outrage:

If we sort tweets by level of impact, we can see that the top three most-retweeted posts speak for themselves:

The top three most-retweeted posts about Clean for the Queen

The negative posts certainly got the most attention. In fact, the first positive tweet defending the campaign that we come across is in 146th place, with just 46 retweets:

A divisive campaign

Yet in spite of their lack of impact, the positive messages were there. The top hashtags used in tweets about the campaign show just how divisive #CleanForTheQueen was: we can see that although there were some negative hashtags around the campaign such as #cleanitupyourselfmaam, #openyoureyes and #cleanupyourownacts, there were also some very positive ones such as #volunteering, #cleanforthecommunity and #litterpick.

The most common hashtags used in tweets about Clean for the Queen

Keep Britiain Tidy also got a fair amount of support from Twitter. The @KeepBritainTidy Twitter account was mentioned 1,379 times over the course of the weekend. If we look at the top expressions used in tweets mentioning @KeepBritainTidy, we can see that posts were far more positive:

Top expressions used in tweets about Clean for the Queen that also mention the @KeepBritainTidy Twitter account

Hundreds of people posted photos of local volunteers collecting rubbish:

Clean for the Queen may have attracted a lot of criticism, but the campaign’s director has declared it a success worth getting a bit of stick for. In favor of the monarchy or not, some admitted that working together to clean up the streets was a worthy cause:

It’s undeniable the Clean for the Queen was a PR diaster. The campaign offended a lot of people, and the naysayers certainly spoke out the loudest: a broad overview of data around the campaign paints a very negative picture indeed.

However, its sensational PR flop hides the fact the initiative itself was not a total failure: the campaign still brought communities together for a good cause and raised awareness around Britain’s litter problems.

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Published in Crisis