Our first campaign ‘Genext’ was early in the agency’s inception and Launched in 2010.
Genext was a nationwide participatory youth campaign in Uganda advocating for family sizes that people could afford to look after.
Implemented by the Uganda Health Marketing Group (UHMG) with the support of United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the project brought together youth aged 18 to 30 years as “Good Life” Ambassadors, who are rallying for a smaller population by 2013. In addition to advocacy with community leaders and through the media, we used online social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to promote having the size of family one could afford to look after for a better quality of life.
Since then we’ve come a long way and done hundreds of campaigns we believe in with the latest being a campaign to encourage turnout for vaccine trials across Africa and we are currently working on a campaign to understand and encourage people to take up vaccination.
In all of our work there have been three main things that we have learnt are integral to the success of your campaign
- Clearly understanding the objective;
This is the most important for obvious reasons but it will astound you how many of us don’t spend enough time really thinking this through or communicating it consistently to the teams around us responsible for creating the results we want. When using digital media to encourage behaviour change or uptake of a product it is critical that you are clear as day and realistic about what you want digital to deliver for the campaign – is it mass awareness, is it uptake of a particular product? Is it to sign an online petition? These objectives literally need to take a seat in every meeting!
- Research the Audience
Whether it is quantitative or qualitative; research is the bedrock of any campaign, when creating messaging especially for NPO projects – there are a lot of cultural nuances you need to consider. What may work in one culture may be completely unacceptable in another. We are working on a campaign across two African countries and have had to ensure that our tone of voice and messaging are completely unique, which is as it should be!
- Carefully select your platforms
From your research; an important question to ask is ‘where does my audience get it’s information’, who are the primary influencers and how do they currently feel about the issue whether it is small families or sugary drinks. As soon as you know where your audience go to for information – that should be what decides which digital platforms you use – not what you ‘think’ would work
There’s a whole lot more that we’ve learned that we’d love to share with you so click here to Join our free webinar on the 14th October 2021