British Red Cross spoke at our latest Relay event, Mass Participation: Inspiration, Innovation, and Content, on Communicating about refugees in a culture of misinformation and prejudice. Freya Carr, Senior Media Officer, and Nana Crawford, Social Media Manager, at British Red Cross talked us through their learnings.
The team had previously seen in the comments sections of their social media posts that there were widespread misconceptions about refugees, their situation, and the difficulties of integrating into a new community. Even the term was misunderstood, with people struggling to tell the difference between refugees and people seeking asylum. After realising this, educating people on who refugees are, on refugee policy in the UK, and what some of the main issues are for refugees trying to rebuild their lives in a different country became focal points for the team.They set out to run a campaign that had an impact in these areas and was still in keeping with the Red Cross brand, in the understanding that some of their audiences might not be so open to the ideas they would be faced with.
They felt it was vital to use the real, lived experiences of refugees to ensure that the campaign was authentic, without actually putting them in the spotlight too much by making them feature in creative. At this point they decided to work with RAW London to make a film on the challenges of integrating as a refugee, which you can watch below.
To ensure that they stuck to their plan for authenticity, a group of refugees fed into all of the scripts and the edits to make sure that their experience was genuinely mirrored in the film.
