WaterAid: Tailoring your tone Or Are you talking to me?

This post is intended as an overview of  a speaker session at our charity event The modern charity: Using video to connect with current and potential supporters, which took place on 14 July 2016.

Fiona Callister, Head of Global Media at WaterAid, brought us back to basics to remind us that every single piece of content must help your organisational aims. Never forget :

1. Objective: define the change you want to happen
2. Strategy: how that change will happen
3. Tactics: the content

As an example, Fiona gave an overview of WaterAid’s brilliant #ifmenhadperiods campaign.

Objective

• encourage sign up for a petition to UK govt
• raise awareness that 1/3 of world’s population doesn’t have a safe toilet
• Do a little bit towards breaking the taboo around periods and so making it easier to discuss the issues whether a teenage girl or govt decision maker

Strategy

• Use humour to get people to engage with the issues/share on social
• To widen the audience for sharing the content, give it a news peg
• Target audiences:
  • Digital Natives,
  • Global Citizens
  • Also sector colleagues

Tactics

• Don’t kill ideas with process
• Avoiding the cliché
• How to persuade internally

Did it work?

• The three films were viewed a total of 2.2million times.
• Most of the views came through media hits
• Over 100 media hits
• #ifmenhadperiods hit 3.5million Twitter accounts
• Tweeted by a number of “decision makers”
• Resulted in op-eds discussing the taboo
• AND 115,000 signatures for the UK petition.