Despite domestic abuse being a national issue that affects huge numbers of people, it's a problem that's often hidden and that people can find extremely difficult to talk about. This can mean that victims, or people at risk of abuse don't always know where to find information that can directly help them.
The context
In Essex we've been working for many years to try and break down these barriers. The Southend, Essex and Thurrock domestic abuse board is made up of the county council, the two unitary authorities (Southend and Thurrock) in Greater Essex and our partners in the police, NHS CCGs, rehabilitation, prosecution and other domestic abuse support services. As part of that partnership we look for ways to commission services more effectively and pool our resources and channels to maximise the reach of our messages.
One of our strategic priorities is to raise awareness of our support services so we decided to create the #TogetherWeCan campaign to promote the availability of our Essex Victims Gateway, which we developed as a partnership. It's an interactive tool that allows people to type in their postcodes and select the type of abuse they feel that they may be a victim of. The tool then returns a list of appropriate support services available in the area. In addition to raising awareness we also wanted to increase reporting and confidence in the services on offer.
What we did
We decided to launch a phased campaign to maximise reach and keep momentum going. We launched the first phase through traditional media including print, outdoor advertising and some online advertising. We wanted to start by informing as many people as possible about the gateway and highlighting our collective partnership approach. We took our poster campaign out into the community and reinforced our messages through social media and our hashtag #TogetherWeCan. We also made use of our social media influencers across Essex. In additional to community influencers we reached out to local celebrities including former Olympic swimmer Mark Foster and the Colchester United Football Club who were all happy to share our content. With over 100,000 followers between them, this extended our potential reach enormously.
We took a more targeted approach to the second phase of the campaign, focusing on young people. Our messages centred on helping young people to understand non-physical abuse and what's healthy in relationships. We held focus groups with a range of young people who told us that video and social media channels with content focused on real stories from their peer group would have the greatest impact on them rather than corporate messages. As a result we created short videos following real stories from two young people in Essex, posting them on Instagram, which was a new channel for us. We also developed materials for professionals who work with young people to help reiterate our support services.
The impact
We saw an immediate surge in traffic to our website and the gateway when we launched the first phase of the campaign and we've been able to maintain higher visitor levels than we had before this work started
In many respects it's too early to say exactly what the impact has been but we've got a detailed plan in place to record and evaluate its effectiveness. Our new paid for social media advertising will provide us with more detailed analytics and over the next year we will be including questions on victim questionnaires to help ascertain whether people who have sought help were aware of the services available to them. It's a sensitive issue and we have to be conscious of that when we're evaluating the work.
Why it worked
Strong partnerships were undoubtedly key to achieving what we have. The collaboration between all the agencies involved in #TogetherWeCan has been brilliant and we've been able to make use of each other's skills and resources to deliver a campaign that brings all our services together to better support victims and those at risk. Working together also strengthened our credibility with stakeholders across the county and helped us to think more creatively about how to promote our messages.
The next phase of the campaign will see us launch some street theatre to promote our messages, which is something none of us would have been brave enough to commission without the support from the group.
Lesson learnt
Our focus groups showed us that residents, especially young people, didn't want messages that were obviously council generated, which has really helped us to think about how we brand our activities and services. We've also learnt that the speed of social media means you have to keep momentum up between campaign phases. I think we will launch the phases more closely together in the future.
Want to know more?
For more information please contact Philip Cruddace.