Twenty million steps: how we helped Stepping Out with Carers double its goal

Some projects you finish and file away. Others keep walking. Our work with Stepping Out with Carers is very much the second kind, and this year it walked further than any of us expected.

A small charity with a big idea

Stepping Out with Carers brings unpaid carers together on sociable group walks. It’s simple, and it works: fresh air, good company and a bit of time that belongs to the carer, not the caring. There are millions of unpaid carers in the UK (you can read more about them at Carers UK), and most of them would never describe themselves that way. They’re just looking after mum, or a partner, or a child.

Each year the charity runs The Big Step Out, a national walking festival that celebrates carers and the people they support. When we started working together in 2024, the goal was to turn it from a collection of lovely local walks into something that felt like a movement. You can see the start of that story in our Stepping Out with Carers case study.

The First Step

Everything we’ve made for the campaign comes back to one idea: The First Step. For a lot of carers, the hardest part isn’t the walk. It’s deciding they’re allowed to take an hour for themselves. So the brand is warm, bright and a little bit playful, with a set of bouncing “legs” that can walk across a poster, a social post, a T-shirt or a web page. It needed to feel welcoming to a 19-year-old young carer and an 80-year-old caring for their husband, and it needed to be easy for local groups to pick up and use without us in the room.

That’s the same thinking we bring to every brand identity we design: build something with a clear idea at the middle, then make it flexible enough that other people can run with it.

Why we built a step counter

The Big Step Out lives or dies on participation. People walk all over the country, at different times, in groups and on their own. The challenge was making all of that feel like one shared effort.

So as part of the new website, we designed and built a live step counter. Anyone taking part can log their steps (or wheel rotations, or dance moves, or dog walks, because everything counts), and every entry adds to a running national total on the homepage. Alongside it, walkers can share walk stories: who they walked with, where they went and why it mattered. Those stories turned out to be the heart of the campaign. They’re funny, moving and very real, and they gave the charity a steady stream of content for social media and press.

It’s a good example of a website doing a job rather than just sitting there. We cover more of how we approach that on our web design page.

Ten million steps. Then twenty.

This year the charity set itself a target of 10 million steps. It felt ambitious. Then the entries started coming in, and the counter didn’t stop. By the end of The Big Step Out, walkers had logged more than 20 million steps, double the goal.

Watching that number tick over was one of the best moments of our year. Every one of those steps was a carer getting out of the house, or a friend walking alongside them, or a local group that didn’t exist a few years ago.

Highly Commended at the Carers UK Awards

The campaign has since been Highly Commended at the Carers UK Awards. That recognition belongs to the charity, its CEO Sue Mott and the volunteers and walk leaders who make it happen. We’re just very proud to have played our part, and to have watched a two-person studio’s work help something this good grow.

As Sue put it: “The thing about Mammoth is they listen. They make sure your new branding is still you, only better.” We’ll take that.

What we’ve learned

• Give people something to add to. A live total turns thousands of separate walks into one story. People love seeing their steps count.
• Collect stories, not just numbers. The walk stories did more for the campaign than any advert could.
• Build a brand other people can use. The brand is designed so local groups can make their own posters and posts. That’s how a campaign scales without a big budget.
• Stick with it. The best results came from a long-term partnership, not a one-off project. It’s the same thing we wrote about in Mammoth 3.0: partnerships over projects.

If you’re a charity or community organisation with a campaign that needs to reach further, we’d love to hear about it. Have a look at our recent work, see what we do, or just say hello.