Warsaw Fellowship 2016

NoUnsexyQuestions - Cutting The Cake Is Not As Easy As It Sounds

Levke Burfeid, 2016 Ideas Incubator Fellow, Germany

Michalina Ferencz, 2016 Ideas Incubator Fellow, Poland

Andy Post, 2016 Ideas Incubator Fellow, USA

Designing the Campaign: 

We were lucky to be assigned to our first choice topic wise: women! Well, that is easy, we thought. Something about women rights, a topic some of us had already been engaged in for some time. In a sense it was true - we had immediately many ideas. Since we were not advocating for any distanced group, we didn't had to figure out what "this group" actually wants. We were advocating for ourselves and we were able to quickly name many important topics. Sexual violence, victim blaming, slut shaming, high discrepancies between rape statistics, double standards for men and women, abortion laws, new masculinity studies, etc. But as quickly as the ideas came we realized how broad our topics of interests still were. As Tara Dickman, Ideas Incubator trainer on community organizing, termed it: we wanted the whole cake.
To specify our interests we needed to narrow down our target group. Whom do we actually want to reach? It was very important for us not to limit our audience to women. Although they form the majority of victims of sexual violence we agreed that men need to be included in the conversation. Finally, we decided on our campaign: #NoUnsexyQuestions. Speak out against Sexual Violence and Communicate for Care. By sharing videos of positive experiences of learning and communicating about sex we sought to encourage peer-to-peer sexual education.

Implementation: 
This was our first time implementing a social media campaign--lessons came quickly. One of the first challenges was finding ways to simply convey our message without becoming too verbose. As we learned from Marek Dorobisz, a creative director and expert in media campaigning, we have about seven seconds to a) pique our audience’s interest and b) encourage them to act. In many instances we wanted to write detailed paragraphs about our campaign, its intentions, and the nuances of issues of sexual violence in Poland. However, we learned catering to a fleeting audience requires short, catchy taglines. We quickly realized one of the limitations of a social media campaign is the depth to which we could inform our audience.
Another challenge included translation from English to Polish. In many cases, the vocabulary used to describe sexual safety and sexual violence in English do not have graceful translations. For example, “rape survivor” is a common phrase in English that reframes the negative connotations of “rape victim.” In Polish, the equivalent phrase is uncommon if used at all. Perhaps a goal for the future would be to introduce a vocabulary to discuss rape culture and sexual assault in Polish.

Reflections: 
After implementing our campaign we realized that Facebook is a place of high competition. Though we’d heard about it before, we didn't expect to struggle with the amount of Likes we were supposed to reach. Part of the problem is definitely our general inactivity on Social Media. As a social activist who wants to work on an online platform, it is helpful to already have an audience of friends. This may give us a better chance to compete against cute kitten pages.
However, we did get a lot of positive feedback. Some people felt even personally touched and asked and commented about our campaign. Engagement ranged from Moms to classmates from primary school to ex-boyfriends. In the end, we found confidence in our campaign as the quality of the feedback was more important than the number of views and Likes.