The Campaign

We were tasked to create a campaign that would help raise awareness of women abuse and help change the mentality that women abuse is an acceptable social behavior. We wanted to create a campaign that would unite and empower every woman – removing the taboo or embarrassment of speaking out against abuse. Together with the Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation and Marie Claire magazine we created the Women Against Abuse hashtag campaign. We invited Thailand’s top female celebrities to join in support of our cause and help launch the campaign. We took a photo of each of the celebrities with a symbolic bruise under one eye and created a launch ad that was published in Marie Claire’s November issue. The launch ad carried campaign details and a call to action for readers. We then uploaded each of the celebrity photos to social media sites along with a call to action for the public to do the same with the hashtag #WomenAgainstAbuse. In three days, more than 10,000 individual photos were uploaded to social media sites. Nationwide news channels, newspapers and online media featured our campaign and helped promote the message – achieving more than 7.6 million baht in free and earned media, while working in parallel with social media to create a nationwide network of support. Within the first month of the campaign, daily calls to the Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation increased by up to 500%, going from an average of 5-10 calls a day to 30!

The Brief

Our work was developed to raise awareness as well as create a shift in how Thais, as a society, view and respond to women abuse, to make women abuse a social problem, not an individual one. Victims and observers of abuse in Thailand typically do not come forward or speak out about it. In part, this might be a result of fear – fear of repercussions, fear of being stigmatized, etc., but on a whole it is because Thais have been socialized to believe that women abuse is a personal, domestic issue, not a social one.

Results

With the objective of raising awareness as well as creating a shift in how Thais, as a society, viewed and respond to women abuse, our campaign’s effectiveness can be measure in 3 distinct categories: 1.) Participation, 2.) Exposure, and 3.) Action. Participation: #WomenAgainstAbuse campaign drew more than 10,000 individual photo uploads and tags across a variety of social media sites in just 3 days, promoting the message and the cause. Exposure: Nationwide news channels, newspapers and online media featured our campaign – achieving more than 7.6 million baht in free and earned media. Action: within the first month the foundation experienced up to a 500% increase in daily calls after the launch of the campaign – going from an average of 5-10 calls a day to an average of 30 a day.

Execution

Launch Phase: We used the ad in Marie Claire to launch the campaign and to help start building awareness. The message informed readers of the cause and included a call to action that would drive public participation in an online social media “movement” that would culminate on November 25th, International Stop Violence Against Women Day. Build-up Phase: In this phase, we further leveraged the star power of the 7 female celebrities in our campaign to reach out to their social network followers. The content focused on building awareness, featuring facts and statistics about women abuse and encouraged readers to join in the online movement. Action Phase: In the days leading up to November 25th, we shifted from informative messages to more direct, invitational messages – featuring a call to action and how-to mechanics to participation. We continued to leverage the power of celebrity and PR coverage to drive participation.

The Situation

The reason this elicited a Public Relations campaign is that is is a very public issue! Thailand ranks 2nd in the world for the occurrence and acceptance of women abuse. And according to the same UN report, 63% of the Thai population thinks it's acceptable for a husband to beat his wife. It is a fact that victims and observers of abuse in Thailand typically do not speak out. This might be a result of fear but on a whole it is because Thais have been socialized to believe that women abuse is a personal issue, not a social one.

The Strategy

In the development of the campaign material, we approached women that were identifiable to the broader Thai female population – ones they could relate to and also be positively influenced by – to help us communicate our message. We built this campaign around role models/women other women aspire to be, and in doing so we were able to start breaking down the belief that it is not acceptable to talk about women abuse. With over 18 million social media users in Thailand, we chose that as the main medium in which we would share our message and drive participation. While we created the campaign, we wanted the public to own it and embrace it as their own. The campaign rolled out in three key phases: Launch, Build-up, and Action.