Objectives

The stigma and embarrassment attached to women's periods causes big problems worldwide – for example, one in ten girls in Africa miss school when menstruating. As a girls' rights focused charity, our goal was to create a social media led engagement campaign, that not only raised awareness of this problem, challenge harmful attitudes around menstruation, and got the UK public talking about an issue they will often shy away from.

Primary objective: create awareness and social media engagement about the issue and Plan International UK's work

Secondary objective: generate donations to support our menstruation related work in Uganda

Strategy and Execution

The #JustaTampon campaign ran for just one week, with the biggest burst of activity occurring within the first three days. We asked the public to take a selfie with a tampon, post it on their social media accounts and text to donate £3 to our menstruation-related projects in Uganda that provides sanitary products and education to girls. This mechanic was witty, simple and shareable, but also had a serious message behind it.

Seeding

Celebrities and VIPs were approached to generate awareness and help improve reach of the campaign. Channel 4 news anchor, Jon Snow, who has 1.09m followers on Twitter, kicked off the campaign by posting a selfie on Twitter, linking to the website landing page. Other celebrities then followed including comedian Kathy Lette and comedian Jenny Éclair. Frieda Pinto was also interviewed about the struggles girls face during their period.

Vloggers were also approached ahead of the campaign. Riyadh K, who has over 200,000 subscribers, and Rosianna Halse Rojas who has over 47,000 subscribers, vlogged about the campaign and the issue.

As the campaign picked up on social media, news media outlets were also approached to pick up on the trend. Success in each space was used to drive further success in another; as more people took part, more media picked it up, driving more people to get involved.

Supporting content

Plan International UK and V. Point news disseminated content that linked back to the website landing page asking people to take action. Content included:

• an infographic around the myths of menstruation
• a video that shows men's reactions and thoughts around what menstruation is and the products women use
• a video that shows how people react to the dreaded tampon drop
• a video diary of a man wearing a sanitary towel for a day
• real life stories by girls from Africa who didn't understand what was happening to their bodies when they started menstruating and the challenges they continue to face
• reactions on social media to the campaign, including a best of the selfies.

Apart from the myths infographic, all the content was created in house.

The total budget for the campaign was £0

Results

Within the first three days from the 8 June to the 10 June, we received:

Social media:

• 1,511 tweets from 1,304 twitter accounts, containing @planuk and #justatampon.This was the highest engagement spike Plan International UK saw for the year in the timeframe of just three days.
• 5,602,488 accounts reached
• Tweets from media outlets included Marie Claire, Cosmo, Guardian, Independent, Metro, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, MashableMost retweeted tweet: Jon Snow's tweet generated 1,054 retweets.
• Top contributors: @NathanFillion; @JonSnowC4; @UNWomen; @UNGEI; @NimkoAli; @NSPCC; @TheGirlEffect; @JennyEclair @PetraNemcova; @KathyLette; @CarolSmillie1; @CathyNewman
• 194 new twitter followers from the campaign in just three days.

Traditional media:

• 70 clips with an estimated reach of 45m including Buzzfeed, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Independent, Guardian, Mirror, Metro, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmo and more.

Web traffic:

• During the week of the campaign, 2,069 unique users visited the #justatampon landing page.
• Our supporting content for the campaign, menstruation myths infographic, brought in 9,628 unique users that week and Facebook was responsible for 41% of the traffic to that page. The menstruation myths infographic is still one of Plan International UK's best performing content pieces to date, totalling 15,276 unique pageviews and is the second highest viewed page on Plan International UK's blog of all time.
• Total users to Plan International UK's website http:plan-uk.org.uk increased by 155% compared to the previous week.

Donations:

• We received a total of £1,370 from 468 texts for our project work in Uganda.

Media