Public sector communications excellence awards – bronze winner: Highlighting the dangers of child sexual exploitation (CSE) is an important priority for councils and their partners throughout the country. Phil Parker, Head of Communications at Dudley Council explains how they used animation and online platforms to warn and inform young people, parents, carers and the public about the dangers.
The challenge
The West Midlands, like all areas of the country, has child exploitation issues. It’s a difficult topic, but discussing it openly and raising awareness is absolutely vital for tackling this horrific crime. Since 2014 Dudley, Wolverhampton, Sandwell, Walsall, Coventry, Birmingham and Solihull councils, along with West Midlands Police, have been working together to raise awareness of CSE through the regional see me hear me campaign. Communications is led by Dudley Council’s communications and public affairs team.
The 2016/17 campaign was to continue to help bring the issue out into the open and assist children, parents, teachers, professionals, and the wider public, with understanding the issue and spotting the signs.
The solution
We set ourselves the objective of creating a visually integrated campaign raising awareness of child sexual exploitation across the West Midlands, highlighting the warning signs and encouraging people of all ages to visit the campaign website to find out more.
We decided to target our campaign at two distinctive audiences: young people aged 10 to 18 and parents/teachers/professionals and the general public.
At the start of our campaign planning we held a focus group with young people to identify how best to engage with them. We had already decided that digital platforms would be the most effective channel for reaching this particular audience, but the young people we met with helped us to decide that an animation would have more impact, and would have a higher chance of being shared, than a static advert. They also told us that they would be more likely to respond to messages about looking after their friends than themselves.
This insight steered us towards creating a film based on photographs charting different stages of a relationship. It flicked through images and words including fun and excitement, before moving on to danger, threats and abuse. It finishes with a clear call to action: ‘do you know what your friend’s doing?’ with details of how young people can find help or more information. We developed male and female versions and rolled the campaign out for four weeks across digital platforms, focusing on websites, social media sites and gaming applications. We also ran posters in the washrooms at Birmingham New Street Station and on the M6 digital towers.
For the second stage of the campaign, we tailored our animation to address parents, carers and other adults. We used images which moved through the different signs that people might see, such as unexplained gifts or changes in appearance, moving towards more serious issues such as lies or staying out late. We concluded the film with the line ‘Could this be your child?’ and directed viewers to where they could find more information. As before, we rolled the campaign out across digital channels and train station posters, but also used imagery on the walkway to the NEC, on the inside of buses and on large outdoor posters. We also used radio advertising and face-to-face activity to get our messages through to this target audience.
The impact
See me Hear me pushes a difficult yet vital message to young people, their parents, carers and professionals. We recorded a 119 per cent increase in the number of people visiting the campaign website during 2016/2017 compared with the previous year. During the eight weeks of the campaign we achieved 33,939 page views on our website and 3,082,764 Twitter impressions. Talking openly about the issue has clearly helped us achieve our objective to raise awareness and signpost where to go for more information and support.
Why it worked / how we’re sustaining it
Engaging with young people at the outset played a key role in the success of the campaign. Taking on board their views about how they’d best respond to the key messages, helped shape this crucial element of the campaign.
Supporting the digital element, posters were displayed on transport networks and hubs across the region, as well as on-the-ground activity led by CSE teams at train and bus stations across the region
The see me, hear me campaign has continued into its fourth year, with future campaigns to raise awareness of the abuse planned. We continue to explore using a number of media channels to deliver our key messages, directly to target audiences.
Lessons learned
The value of engaging with young people during the planning stage was key and this is something we will be continuing with for future campaign phases. Also, ensuring we picked the right digital media for the different target audiences was instrumental in helping us achieve the 119% increase in visits to our website.
Want to know more?
For more information please contact Phil Parker, Head of Communications at Dudley Council.