JumpStart Pitch
I won Best Individual Pitch Presenter at JumpStart WA 2025 for a youth recruitment campaign that made 16-19 year olds reconsider policing as a career.
The Brief
WA Police Force needed more new officers but couldn't attract 16-19 year olds who saw policing as restrictive, risky, and "not for people like me." The existing "People Like You" campaign worked for older audiences but completely missed school leavers and recent graduates who couldn't see themselves in the uniform.
What We Did
Working with my JumpStart team at KALAIDOS agency, we developed a pitch and implementation plan that flipped the perspective/ instead of telling young people what policing is, we showed them what it offers: purpose, belonging, and real community impact. The campaign, "Step Forward," positioned policing as a calling driven by courage and compassion.
My Role
I led the strategy development and delivered the pitch presentation alongside my fellow teammates. The strategy revolved around targeting two specific target audiences who could be summarised through one sentence each being those who were already interested and those who weren't sure if policing was for them but wanted to help. This segmentation of the target audience was driven by the three main insights of:
They seek purpose and people
They learn through doing rather than listening
Their opinions are shaped by what they experience
Strategic development shaped our campaign by framing it around those human truths.
The Pitch
The campaign operated on a $150k budget split across three phases: awareness (45% paid social), consideration (influencer partnerships and campus activations), and conversion (application support and cadet testimonials). Media strategy prioritized TikTok and Instagram where 16-19 year olds actually spend time, not traditional channels where they don't.
Success metrics focused on long-term perception shifts, not quick wins. I proposed tracking:
15-20% website traffic growth to police recruitment pages
150 monthly cadet applications (up from baseline of ~80)
10% brand favourability uplift among 16-19 year olds
The pitch acknowledged that changing how people see an entire career path takes time and cultural fluency, not just louder ads or bigger budgets.
The Award
I won Best Individual Pitch Presenter among 20 JumpStart WA 2025 graduates. The pitch worked because it treated the audience—WA Police Force stakeholders, not the 16-19 year old targets—like real people with legitimate concerns about youth recruitment challenges, rather than approaching it as selling.
Key Learning
The hardest and most valuable marketing work is making people care about something they're conditioned to ignore. That's what separates campaigns that get remembered from ones that just get scrolled past. This project proved I could develop strategy, present with confidence, and propose measurable outcomes that respected the complexity of the challenge.
