PR campaign for DRC
Talking about a difficult topic: how to promote an online course for residents of uncontrolled territories
Prehistory
To inform the audience living in the uncontrolled territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts about the online course on informing about the risks of explosive hazards such as mines and unexploded ordnance.
The course was developed with the assistance of the Danish Refugee Council – Danish Demining Group (DRC-DDG). The global objective of the promotional campaign was to promote the course through multichannel digital tools.
Decision
At the stage of preparation and collection of information, the agency’s team talked to people who live or have had experience in the JFO areas to better understand what causes positive and negative associations, what is a trigger, and what content is avoided. The survey participants were initially distrustful of such questions, but after successful communication, they realized the main goal of the campaign – to take care of the lives and safety of people living in the risk zone.
Thanks to the results, our WARTO team developed the concept of “difference in 1 course”, which compared two pictures: when a person did not know how to behave in dangerous situations, and when a person took a course and avoided danger thanks to the knowledge they had gained. Thus, we did not just advertise the course, but created a full-fledged information field.
Facebook, YouTube, and Google were chosen as promotion channels. The content of each channel was divided according to age and partly gender segmentation.
The general audience of the course is very broad – women and men from 6 to 99+ years old, i.e. almost unlimited in age, but we understood that some older target groups do not have such regular access to the Internet as young people, for example, and use social media less often and spend less time online.
The target groups of the promotional campaign were 6-11 years old, 12-17 years old, 18-30 years old, 31-44 years old, and 45-59 years old. The main tool for reaching the younger audience was animated videos for YouTube. In order to reach the 60+ audience, in addition to targeting, we directed the information campaign to younger age groups with a clear message: “show this to your parents, tell your grandparents about it.”
An important insight for the team was the refusal to use photos with faces in posts with a negative context, even from photo stocks – when we needed to show a person in full, we used illustrations to avoid additional triggers. Although the factor of fear for one’s life still remained one of the factors that attracted the audience’s attention the most, one of the most successful visuals was a comic strip with a person in a hospital wheelchair.
Result
1
ad impressions
1
click on the course link