The Believe Survivors video concept was born out of an ongoing, global discussion around sexual assault and the way survivors of sexual violence are treated. The Me Too Movement was the catalyst for the October Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, where accused sexual assailant Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination dominated headlines. Considering the constant attacks on and callous lack of support shown to Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford in the media and online, we wanted to use this moment in time to stand with survivors and allies watching her testimony, and declare that believing survivors of sexual violence is of the upmost importance. The objective of the video was to educate people about how to respond when someone you know experiences a sexual assault, as well as to demonstrate that respecting sexual assault survivors is a key Planned Parenthood value, bringingempathy and personal relevance to the discussion.
As sex educators, we often have to teach about topics that can make people uncomfortable, but we have to be especially mindful when talking about sexual violence and the needs of survivors. In this video, we wanted to give our audiences the basics on how to be a supportive ally to survivors of sexual assault, and encourage skills that are based in empathy and de-stigmatization.
All of the information presented was thoroughly reviewed by members of the Planned Parenthood Education Division, who are experts in public health information and messaging to online audiences with an eye towards behavior change. By collaborating with them, we ensure that the information we share is up-to-date, research-based, and easy for audiences to understand.
We worked with our Creative team to design this content in a way that helps users stay engaged, relate to the message, and retain the information..
Making information easy to access and understand is at the core of our video strategy. In this case, it was important to us that the video be informative, yet short and simple. The text-based video allows the information to be available with or without audio — this make the video accessible for people with auditory issues. Keeping the video limited to one minute ensures better audience retention and allows us to publish it to instagram as a feed post. We also later adapted it as an Instagram story, highlighted on our profile and on IGTV, giving users a variety of opportunities to view the content in the most convenient format for them.
To date, the video has seen 599,607 impressions/users reached, 31,539 engagements, and 293,672 views across our owned platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Although this was posted on Twitter earlier in the day than is usually ideal and was followed by several other tweets on the same subject, our Believe Survivors video was the highest performing tweet, gaining over 400k impressions, over 8,000 engagements, and 130k+ views. On Facebook, the video reached 190k users and brought in 4.5k+ engagements. On Instagram, our video post reached over 102k users and had over 7k engagements.
950 of our Facebook engagements and 956 of our twitter engagements were shares/retweets, which widened this content’s reach significantly. This suggests that our audience not only connected with the content and found it informative, but also that they felt it was important for their social circles to have this information as well.
More than 100 artists shared their support for #WeBelieve on social, with a combined following of more than 131 million. Kerry Washington, Chelsea Handler, Aisha Tyler, Padma Lakshmi, Eva Longoria, Diane Guerrero, Kate Walsh, Gabourey Sidibe, Octavia Spencer, Lena Waithe, Olivia Munn, Rosario Dawson, Tika Sumpter, and many more of our top supporters.
