The council produced two campaigns aimed at helping young people develop healthy relationships.
Objectives – what did you want to achieve?
We wanted to develop two campaigns targeted at promoting healthy relationships. The first focused on internet safety, while the second looked at the issue of sexual consent. We wanted to firstly get young people engaged with these topics, talking and sharing advice. We also wanted to be able to direct them to more information about how to stay safe online and information on sexual consent.
Audiences – who did you target and why?
Our focus was 13-17-years-olds in West Sussex. Secondary School aged children who are likely to be interacting online with large friendship groups, experiencing their first relationships and reaching the age of sexual consent.
Strategy – how did you make this happen?
Whilst our kids don’t get what ‘Child Sexual Exploitation’ means it seemed they can relate to stick men!
Our Internet safety theme jumped on the back of ‘Be like Bill’ trend on Facebook. We created our ‘Be like Mandy’ and ‘Be like Tim’ characters. These ran on Internet Safety Day 2016 and in other supporting information to schools.
For the consent ads we put our artistic skills to the test and piggy-backed on the cup of tea consent film. We deployed various versions throughout the summer holidays including results day.
Young people vetted all our ad ideas and the line ‘keep your genitals to yourself’ was taken directly from something one of our young people said in our discussions. Our discussions and testing helped us see it’s a fine balance between cool and trying too hard.
Tactics – what channels, tools, platforms and content did you use?
Both sets of ads were deployed on Facebook and Instagram in a mixture of boosted and paid ads. The consent ads were focused on Friday nights during the summer holidays and GCSE results day. They all linked through to information and advice on our young people’s website ‘YourSpace’.
Did it work? What were the outcomes?
AD Campaign 1 – Internet Safety Facebook & Instagram:
- We reached 28,139 young people via Instagram and Facebook
- 50 per cent of boys in West Sussex and 72 per cent of girls
- 1,318 engaged with the ad in some way (clicked, liked, shared)
- Cost per click .14p
- 91 unique click through to Yourspace
- 6mins 32 seconds average time spent on information page
- 86 per cent of comments were positive or neutral. The majority of young people found the posts funny and the comments instigated interesting discussions.
- all for £200
AD Campaign 2 – Consent Facebook & Instagram: (Friday 29 July)
- Reach 37,395 people (including some adults as we included Facebook boosted posts). 4196 engaged.
- Facebook achieved 1p per click.
- £100 spent.
- 7mins 33 seconds average time spent on information page.
(Friday 5 August)
- Reach 25,368. 612 engaged.
- £100 spent.
- 7mins 8 seconds average time spent on information page.
(GCSE results day - Special message from Mandy and Tim)
- Gif ads to 16-17, Year 11 pupils only. £52 spent.
- Reach 9374. 41 clicks. 54 seconds on the page.
What did you learn?
That we can reach a very targeted set of young people for minimal cost. We are finding that we need lots of fresh ideas and turnaround times to keep up with trends. What they see in the morning is often old hat by the same evening. Top posts are usually GIFs in timelines. All ads reached more girls than boys; whilst girls were more inclined to comment the website clicks were even for both. It was most common for young people to tag their friends in the post.
We quickly learnt that you can only have 20 per cent text in your advertisements, otherwise they stop working. We had to alter our ads very quickly on the day and redeploy them – taking the copy and placing it in the post instead of the graphic.
Would you do anything differently?
We would ensure that all ads came from our YourSpace account not our corporate account as young people related to the account more.
Want to know more?
Contact Faye Rogers, Communications Manager, West Sussex County Council via email.