[music] 0:00:08.6 Jackie Strohm: Welcome to PA Centered, a podcast designed to help listeners be a part of the solution to end sexual harassment, abuse and assault. Each episode, we will take on a topic or a current event to help spark conversation and break down barriers to building communities free from sexual violence. [music] 0:00:32.9 JS: Hi, I'm Jackie Strohm, the Prevention and Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. I'll be your host today as we're joined by folks from Family Support Line and Fiore Design to learn about their public awareness campaign aimed to reach children and youth. This morning, we are joined by Sarah Gibbons, the Executive Director of Family Support Line, Aja King, who was the intern leading the public awareness campaign, and Karen Fiore, of Fiore Design, who designed the campaign Graphics. Welcome, everyone. 0:01:06.1 Aja King: Thank you. 0:01:07.4 Sarah Gibbons: Hi, thank you for having us. 0:01:09.3 Karen Fiore: Yes, thank you. 0:01:10.3 JS: Alright, so to get started, I would love to hear what inspired you to start this campaign, and can you tell us a little bit about the goals of the campaign? 0:01:21.1 AK: Sure. So this campaign was actually a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We've all been affected in some way by stay-at-home orders, but they have especially forced children away from mandated reporters, and these are people like teachers, school counselors and their friends, so they really have limited options to disclose any sexual abuse that had been or is taking place. So this campaign really attacks this as a public health crisis because the Family Support Line realized that increased screen time was leading to an increase in child exploitation on the internet, and we found that reports to the national hotline even rose 103%. So we really found that there was a need to ensure children that help and healing remained available despite the pandemic, and that there was also a need to educate children on the signs of child sexual abuse, the ways that it exists, and really just encourage children to speak up for themselves, their friends, family members, and anybody who they may know that could be going through something traumatic like this. 0:02:33.3 AK: So those are really the broader goals: To educate children on the topic, encourage them to speak up, and really position the Family Support Line as a trusted resource in Delaware County. But more specifically, we really wanted to increase traffic to our website through the use of our digital ads, because our website that we revamped is where this information and where these resources live for these children to get help. 0:03:00.2 JS: So can you tell me a little bit about the process that you all went through from start to finish, of everything that you had to do to make an awareness campaign successful? 0:03:11.5 AK: Yeah, sure. So prior to me being hired as an intern, Family Support Line applied for a grant funding from the Independence Blue Cross Foundation, and they receive $25,000 to run the campaign. And part of this $25,000 included hiring me as an intern for what originally started as three months from June to August. Another portion of it went to hiring a vendor to revamp our website. We hired someone named [0:03:44.1] ____ from Danny design, and her job was to really make our website mobile and user-friendly, and ensure that the resources and information on the site could be easily accessed. And a third portion of it went to hiring Karen from Fiore Design to design our digital ads. So the first step in this process was me actually seeking out these vendors and hiring them for this job. So I began working on the website first with [0:04:18.3] ____, because we really wanted the ad designs to complement our website. 0:04:21.9 AK: So this looked like weeks of building out web content, and really just achieving the functionality of the site, brainstorming what functions we wanted on it, getting input from other staff members to see what they wanted to see on the site. And then the site was finished about four months in advance of the advertisements. And we had launched it and everything with that went well, so then this led to me working with Karen more closely on this ad design portion, and this really took a while, way longer than we expected. We went through... We were originally supposed to go through three rounds of ad mockups, and it ended up being about nine total, and a lot of these rounds consisted of content copy changes because we had to be so careful about the way things were worded, we didn't wanna offend anyone, we had to look at all sides of the situation. And it really consisted of a lot of feedback from Family Support Line's forensic interviewers who really knew best in terms of messaging and what phrases could be said and couldn't be said. So like I said, I worked closely with Karen to create the design on these ads and really solidify the best places where these ads could be placed and where they would be most efficient and have the most success. 0:05:55.7 AK: So I guess, that we did go through nine rounds of ad designs and once they were all approved, we begin pushing out our ads via Instagram and Facebook. So we have about eight to 10 sponsored ads that run. We run one per week, so we put about $50-100 into each of them. And because they are sponsored, they're geographically targeted to Delco children and also targeted by age and interest on these platforms. We did have some plans for Snapchat, TikToks and YouTube and even some billboard options to be incorporated, but timing and budget really didn't allow for that, so we stuck with Instagram and Facebook. But this also delayed our process because while we were creating these ads and coming up with these ideas, we were also submitting more proposals for more grant funding and had to go through that waiting process of seeing whether or not we would get the funding, which unfortunately we didn't. But we used Instagram and Facebook and found the best ways to maximize reach on both of these sites, and we found that this was really through sponsoring our posts. I'm not sure if you have anything to add, Sarah or Karen. 0:07:12.1 SG: Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges about this is we weren't... Aja did a lot of work ahead of time to find out what best practices were across the country, looking to see if there were other ways that children could be reached. We traditionally have been in the schools and out in the community teaching our prevention education, and this was a new uncharted territory for us. So we were really going from having to upgrade everything we were doing with our website launch, and then try to go even further towards being a pioneer with this. So it was a lot of really delicate dancing to make sure that we were both getting up to speed with the technology for the present, and then also working ahead. And what she found is that, surprisingly, people are targeting adults to talk to their kids about this, but there's not direct targeting messaging on social media, which we thought was really interesting. 0:08:18.2 KF: Yeah, and when it came to the process of the ads, that was an interesting process even on our end, just because a lot of the messaging that Family Support Line had wasn't geared towards children per se, and definitely not geared towards Instagram. So that became something where when we were designing the ads, it was necessary to go through so many rounds because I think it was just that visual aspect of being able to see how things were coming together and that on these platforms, it's definitely a quick read, and children don't read a book necessarily on Instagram. They need a quick catch. So it was definitely a little bit of a balancing as in just knowing what to put on the ad and then what to put in the post copy, and then having that back and forth with the people at Family Support Line that knew the best way to talk to children was important. So we went through a few rounds with that, and then that impacted how the designs turned out. So I think that was definitely an important kind of thing to look at when it came to just looking at the demographics and the platform and how that worked with the design, and just this very sensitive messaging to... 'Cause you were really trying to focus, although there's obviously adults that are going to see this, and that's fine, and that's great if they want to be someone that helps in this initiative, but we wanted to make sure that it really resonated with children and the demographic as well. 0:09:48.8 JS: That's really exciting, and I'm glad you were able to lay out for all of us from start to finish. And I'm also wondering if you could tell us a bit about what you've learned from creating and launching this campaign, and if you have any advice for others who wanna implement their own campaign. 0:10:07.1 AK: So the way that we envisioned this campaign in the beginning is completely different from how it turned out. We are the first organization in Pennsylvania to create a campaign that targets children specifically via social media, like Karen and Sarah kind of touched on. Rather than targeting adults, we were really focusing on these children being our target audience. So we really had no blueprint at all, and while there were plans and goals, we were changing things daily as we kinda were just going through the motions and doing more research. So there were a lot of things we discovered throughout this process. It's very time-intensive, obviously a very sensitive topic. And even just the importance of knowing your audience, knowing what would catch these children's eyes, the type of thing that they would read, what they are capable of understanding. And Sarah and Karen also touched on the difficulty of really establishing a social media presence and a following while launching a completely digital campaign simultaneously. That was a huge feat to get over and it was a lot of moving parts with that to make sure that we would even have the audience to see our ads once we started sponsoring them and posting them. 0:11:28.5 AK: So what I really learned to be most valuable and the advice that I would give to others is really to be adaptable, just know how to roll with the punches, don't be discouraged by constructive criticism, even if that criticism could possibly put you back at square one. Just have an open mind and really be prepared for anything. I ended up interning for Family Support Line for a little over seven months total when I was only supposed to be there for three, and the campaign was initially anticipated to be launched within that three-month time frame, and it took a little over seven. So although I would never complain about my time being extended, I'm so grateful that they were able to make that happen and that we were still able to launch the campaign. 0:12:17.5 AK: Sometimes it did feel like I wasn't effectively doing my job, because the time had more than doubled and the campaign still wasn't launched, but it ended up being the greatest feeling to really get to that point and see our impact that our work was having after having worked for hard for so long. So for anyone who wants to implement a campaign similar, I would say that there is a blueprint for it now, so use it in really foreign ways to maximize on the areas that we may have lacked, since we are the first organization in Pennsylvania to do something like this, so you don't really have to start at the drawing board, you can kinda use this format and just really be adaptable and be prepared for sometimes things to not go your way. Do you have any advice, Sarah? 0:13:03.3 SG: I think that that was great feedback, Aja. There were so many different things that happened. When we looked at these ads, we finally had developed them, our target audience was gonna be nine through 12 primarily, because that is really the age that a lot of kids are dealing with child exploitation on the internet, only to find that, as a lot of people know, nine-year-olds aren't even supposed to be on social media. We know they are, but one of those things was trying to figure out, how do we target them when technically that age isn't something that you pick in the demographics for your ads on social media? So it was trying to go around those different things. We got some quotes from public creative companies, and a lot of them were saying, "You can't even target that age group. They're not even supposed to be on social media, even though we know that they're on social media." 0:14:06.0 SG: So that was definitely a learning lesson for us. I think the other learning lesson, and we can talk more about the actual outreach and our outcome measures, and the way that we've been hitting with our traffic and our impressions and all those kinds of things, but what we learned here is that it does not take that much money to reach the audience that you're trying to reach. And that's the really great thing about social media, is each sponsored ad that we were throwing out cost us $50-100, and we were reaching thousands of people in our demographic. That's something that doesn't happen when you do a traditional public awareness campaign. So that was something that was really exciting to us, and it also was really good from a budgetary standpoint, just because we were paying our intern much longer than we had anticipated, so we shifted the money around in order to make it all work. But that was something else that we were really grateful for. 0:15:17.4 KF: I second what Aja said, that it was definitely a process, and looking at building the platforms was important. I think Family Support Line kinda started out the campaign when we were talking about it, they had three followers on their Instagram, and if you're planning an Instagram campaign, you definitely need more than three followers. So there was definitely initiative to look at that and have the platform prepared in order to put the ads out and have a more broad audience, and then obviously that'll keep building, but I think that was really important. And I think just another learning measure was just kind of looking at how these ads are doing, and I feel like I'm still learning in just reviewing how these ads are doing and even just being able to still working closely with Family Support Line just out of interest, honestly, just to see how the ads are doing and what's impacting. Some of them are more full-color photos, and some of them are less full-color photos. So all those little intricacies make a difference when it comes to what appeals to the demographic and what they're gonna click on. So for me, that's definitely a learning process to kinda just see which ones based on when they're deployed and all that, and within Instagram and to see how that response rate is affected by the actual graphics and the wording within the graphics. 0:16:42.2 SG: I'm glad you mentioned that, Karen, 'cause that's another piece of what we learned. Karen's son actually did some community service for us, it just coincidentally he needed to do community service, he's the one who really built up our followers. So that's another piece of advice that I think we learned, is engage your young people in processes like this. Working for child sexual abuse, it's really hard to find volunteer opportunities for people, particularly for young people. Just due to the confidentiality and the nature of the work that we do, it's really hard to create those kinds of ways that they can give back and help us. This was one way that was phenomenal. He was really able to build up our Instagram following so that we actually had that platform ready to go when we launched those ads. So I encourage people to utilize young people and make sure that they can use their social media talents to really help the organization move forward. 0:17:51.6 JS: So now that the campaign has been live for a little bit, how has it been going and what has been the public reaction? 0:18:01.5 AK: We're actually seeing significant results in our reach insights. I second, Sarah, that it's crazy how many people we've reached with such a small budget. Like I said, we designated about $50-100 per ad per week, and that really went a long way, as long as you have the graphics and if you're capable of creating the content and getting the messaging down. It's a really wide range of people that you can reach. So Instagram was really an interesting approach. We realized that regular marketing sometimes isn't as fine-tuned, and that being able to sponsor an ad and go in the back end and target a specific location, a specific people, that really made the results more specific. So we've seen close to 17,000 in reach and close to 39,000 impressions from just one ad. As Karen mentioned, the site went from three people, our website went from three people to about 230 people, as well as our Instagram following. And results like these may seem small to others, but they are huge to us, especially in this line of work, because making a difference in one person's life is an enormous feat when these situations can impact a person for a remainder of their life. So do you wanna go a little more into the insights or reactions, Karen? I know there were some on our reach in Upper Darby, which happens to be our largest target audience. 0:19:38.4 KF: Yeah, exactly. The interesting thing about it, it's kind of funny, I was looking it up just to see, we do a lot of direct mail at Fiore Design, and people spend a lot of money on direct mail, and it's very successful and it's great for fundraising, especially for non-profits, but the cost for that is much more than the cost of an Instagram ad, and considerably. And if you get a reach in self-mail of 2%, you're super duper happy. Whereas the interesting thing is on the insights you have them at your finger tips on your mobile device. For Family Support Line, you can actually just go in and look at insights, you can look at them for the ad and then you can look at them for the entire Instagram feed, and what's going on and who your followers are. And the really interesting thing is Upper Darby is a critical area within Delaware County where Family Support Line educated me to that's definitely an area that they wanna pursue. 0:20:32.3 KF: And with that, there is 6.1% of their audience is in Upper Darby, and you can see that, that granular, which is awesome. And you can actually look in here and you can see also the demographic of the audience and the age range. And although we know that there are kids that are possibly eight that are on there and they've just lied on their age to get on the platform, lied about their age to get on the platform, you can actually see that 2.5% of the audience is from 13-17. So it's really interesting because with self-mail, you wouldn't necessarily know those statistics. You're not knowing who's literally putting it in the trash and who's necessarily reading it. And with Instagram, with such a less spend, they're able to see these insights and who actually is engaging and who's on their platform. And just knowing that they're actually in Delaware County, reaching people, and these people are following them that are in Delaware County, is pretty awesome, actually. 0:21:34.0 SG: Yes, and we've... From a targeting for people that are actually clicking on the website, out of those 39 impressions, or 39,000 impressions that Aja just mentioned, about 79 of them went directly to our website, so that is something that we... That's the goal, is for people to visit our resource page on the website. We also know that this past January, we interviewed 47 children, which is a huge increase from 2019 in January. January 2019, we interviewed 27 children. So that is something that is really remarkable, that we've seen a big increase. It's hard for us to determine whether that is the direct result of our campaign. I think there's a lot of things that we're doing to try to get those kids in to our office, but I think that there's definitely proof that this campaign is really making a difference as far as just educating people to know that we're here. I definitely think that Family Support Line as an entity, as an organization in Delaware County has been elevated due to this campaign. People didn't know who we were a year ago, so that was a big piece of this, was just getting the word out that we actually are in Delaware County, and we are able to help people with this really, really critical time in people's lives, if they're experiencing this. 0:23:18.6 KF: I think also that this is kind of a jumping off point for Family Support Line. We spoke a little bit yesterday about it, and the idea that they're able to see who the followers are, and some of the followers are definitely survivors and children, and they have it posted in there and they're very passionate about the same ideas that Family Support Line is. So Family Support Line has the availability now of these people and these followers that can therefore promote their message as well. They could potentially be used as influencers or just even having that engagement, so that they as well can promote the message of Family Support Line is, kind of a nice jumping off point when it comes to this campaign. 0:23:58.1 SG: Absolutely. And we've really seen an increase in people that wanna come and volunteer for us, people that have a direct tie to this issue, which is really great. And I know one of the things that we're doing as far sustainability, once the official campaign and IBC money has run dry, is we are trying to work on engagement with the followers that we have built up on Instagram. We're working on different images, polls, response kinds of things, just to get people to start talking and to say that they're in support of this issue as far as supporting people that they may know, making sure that they report it, making sure that they are there as trusted adults that can help these kids. So we're really excited about that too, because really the goal is to do this organically so that we're not having to pay the $50 and $100, and so far that has gone really well too. We've had some really good engagement activities, different polls and things like that, that have really been successful, and we hope that they'll continue to be successful as we kind of build through this. 0:25:15.3 JS: That's amazing that you've been able to do all of this. And it sounds like you're all so proud of the work that you did, and you absolutely should be. So my last question is, how can people get involved in the campaign? 0:25:34.9 AK: Other organizations and SACs can actually receive the graphics that we created and put their logos on them and disseminate them and use them for their own use in promoting themselves as a trusted resource for children in their counties and in their geographic location. So we are very open to sharing our ads and allowing people to make them their own, so that they can target the children in their areas. Sarah touched on a little bit that we had Karen's son volunteering to help us with social. So anyone interested in volunteering could absolutely go on our website and reach out about their interest in doing so. And like Sarah said, in the future, we are trying to be more organic now that we have a following, so we are looking for influencers, both internal and external. And these people could be survivors, they could be advocates. Just looking for people that can share our posts and continue to expand our reach. Do you have any other ways, Sarah? 0:26:42.1 SG: I think you covered it. I'm glad you mentioned the influencers, 'cause that's a big piece of this too. We do have people who are very interested, they have big followings. We're hoping that we can get them engaged in this just to spread the message even further. 0:26:54.3 JS: Well, Sarah, Aja and Karen, thank you so much for joining us to talk about your public awareness campaign today. 0:27:03.9 SG: Thank you. 0:27:04.7 AK: Thank you. Thank you for having us. 0:27:06.6 JS: That's all the time we have today. But thanks for listening to this episode of PA Centered. You can learn more about the campaign at FamilySupportLine.org, and visit FioreDesign.net for all your design needs. [music] 0:27:27.4 JS: If you or a loved one needs help, a local sexual assault center is available 24/7. Call 1-888-772-7227 for more information, or find your local center online at pcar.org. Together, we can end sexual violence. Any views or opinions expressed on PA Centered by staff or their guests are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of PCAR or PCAR's funders.