About us

What we do

We nurture and coach the UK’s most vulnerable children and young people to create professional campaigns that trigger local, national, and international change towards sustainable societies and social good.  

In partnership with socially motivated charities, public services, and commercial brands we give children and young people intensive learning experiences that not only help them recover from their difficult childhood circumstances; but create campaigns which are stunningly successful – on average, twice as powerful as campaigns developed by adult-led advertising agencies. 

Our team 

Established as a brand by sole trader Eloise Malone in 2004, Effervescent was registered as a limited company in 2012, and as a charity with Eloise as CEO in 2015. 

Currently, Effervescent has five trustees and seven full time equivalent employees, with twelve associate freelance creatives.  

We are based in an abandoned bank in Plymouth UK which, with a budget of just £5k and 1,000 hours of community volunteering in 2014, we converted into a 6,500 sq ft studio, office, our own RumpusCosy café, and the UK’s only showroom/art gallery curated by children and young people.

​

Successes

• In the last six years we have delivered 5,200 hours of intensive creative work with 260 of the UK’s most vulnerable children and young people, reaching approximately 10 million people worldwide, and live audiences of 75,000 people. 

• We have intensively trained 36 undergraduates in socially engaged campaigning and delivered another 200 hours of university lectures.  

• We have employed five of our young participants as full time employees. With one campaign alone we saved Plymouth City Council £800k this year.  

• In 2015 we were Plymouth UK Company of the Year and in both 2015 and 2016 we were finalists in the UK National Lottery Awards for outstanding Art.  

• In 2017 Effervescent’s foster parent recruitment campaign I.AM.NOT.A.ROBOT won the National Campaign for the Arts Prize for innovative local authority partnership working.

• Recent customers include Plymouth University, Exeter University, YMCA, Barnardo's, Plymouth City Council and Cornwall NHS.

• In 2018 we have been case-studied as a ground-breaking UK creative agency by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport; Arts Council England; and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; and our CEO gave a TED talk on collaborative campaigning with children and young people:

Funding

We are currently predominantly project-funded by organisations such as Arts Council England, Big Lottery, Children in Need, and Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. 

We are Plymouth Royal Mail’s nominated charity of the year 2018. 

We are now embarking on the next phase of the charity’s expansion by building on our solid foundations, enabling us to scale the business and take full commercial advantage of the assets we have built and continue to create.  ​