We celebrate Thanks, Birth Control as a year-round, national effort to mobilize people to speak positively about all that birth control makes possible for young women, families, and our nation. Thanks, Birth Control is an integrated marketing and communications campaign that consists of traditional, social, entertainment, and pop culture media as well as content creation and grassroots activations. The primary goal of Thanks, Birth Control is to give people the opportunity to share their love for their birth control method and everything it has made possible for them, from graduating college to managing a painful medical condition to preventing pregnancy.
The Thanks, Birth Control (TBC) campaign issues four main calls to action:
Take care of your own health,
Activate your friends/family to take care of their sexual health,
Advocate for contraceptive access locally, and
Advocate for contraceptive access nationally.
Birth control is popular. Eighty-five percent of all adults agree that birth control is a basic part of women’s health care. By talking about it, we hope to correct the misperception that birth control is controversial and acknowledge how much it makes possible for individuals, couples, and families everywhere.
On November 13, 2019, Power to Decide celebrated its seventh annual Thanks, Birth Control Day. Across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram we encouraged everyone to share their love for birth control and all it has made possible for them. We asked media partners, influencers, like organizations, politicians, and the public to say #ThxBirthControl.
To increase the use of our hashtag we hosted a Twitter Storm on the afternoon of November 13th (2-3 PM EST), which served as a catalyst for conversation where other national and local organizations, media partners, and Congressional members participated with #ThxBirthControl. This year’s campaign took a micro approach to influencer targeting and focused specifically on sex-ed and reproductive health influencers on Instagram, resulting in over 25 diverse voices saying #ThxBirthControl, more than double last year’s number.
Partners such as Nurx, Simple Health, Medicines360, Twentyeight Health and The Sweet Feminist posted on Instagram and Twitter spreading our hashtag, #ThxBirthControl. Key media partners such as MTV, Dr. Drew, Emily Morse, Womanly Magazine, Charreah Jackson, Mama Doctor Jones (YouTube Video), and Freeform, among other entertainment media leaders took to social media as well.
Alongside distributing a press release for the day, we generated various digital articles about Thanks, Birth Control on our Power to Decide and Bedsider websites. Through our media outreach initiatives, we garnered media coverage from Bustle, Teen Vogue, Elite Daily, Ms. Magazine, New York Daily News, and The Odyssey.
Notably, we hand delivered #ThxBirthControl lapel pins to more than 100 Congressional offices. Fifteen members of Congress posted to their social media accounts for Thanks, Birth Control Day, including Representatives Jan Schakowsky (IL), Barbara Lee (CA), and Marc Veasey (TX). Sixteen state policymakers also participated (including the Michigan State Department of Health and Human Services, 13 elected officials, and a party official in Tennessee). Secretary Hillary Clinton also took part again this year; her tweet had more than 33,000 likes and almost 6,000 retweets, the most among participating policymakers.
At least 27 national policy partners including SIECUS, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA), In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, and the Urban Institute, posted messages on their social media accounts. At least 14 state organizations participated, including FactFoward in South Carolina, Texas Women’s Healthcare Coalition, and Women’s Foundation of Mississippi. Additionally, numerous local Planned Parenthood and NARAL affiliates across the nation also posted.
Our CEO, Ginny Ehrlich, conducted a national radio media tour to celebrate Thanks, Birth Control. Especially newsworthy were her airings on NBC News Radio (airing nationally), the #1 All News station in San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose (KCBS-AM), and the metro-area networks in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Tampa/St. Petersburg—all totaling 1,613 airings nationally.
In addition to our traditional Thanks, Birth Control merchandise, we launched new inventory including beach balls and wine glasses. We distributed thousands of pieces of “swag” this year—with approximately 600 products sold directly from our consumer-facing store.
The Thanks, Birth Control campaign was an overall success in its seventh year. Between November 1-30, there were over 100 million potential impressions and a potential reach of 71.5 million across Twitter. The hashtag trended nationally for much of the afternoon which resulted in a 56% increase in engagement compared to last year.
Our Twitter storm had over 3,000 tweets during the hour and 37.8 million impressions, causing the hashtag to trend nationally. Nurx’s Instagram post showed an over-performance in engagement of 28.5 times over their typical posts. Similarly, an Instagram post by #ThxBirthControl partner The Sweet Feminist, had nearly 20K engagements, almost double their typical post response. MTV donated their billboard in Times Square to Thanks, Birth Control for the third year in a row, running our artwork/graphics for 22 hours in its regular rotation pro bono. The billboard reaches approximately 500,000 visitors to Times Square each day.
Overall, the Thanks, Birth Control social campaign was another tremendous success in 2019. In the month of November:
There were 19,816 mentions of the hashtag, with nearly 103 million potential impressions, and a potential reach of 71.5 million.
There were over 651.3K engagements (shares, comments, likes, video and story views, etc.) with the hashtag, a 56% increase in engagement compared to 2018.
Sentiment for the hashtag was 96% positive.
