We ran a workshop with the wellness team to understand the issues students were facing and the user journey to the University’s Report and Support tool. From this, we discovered that incidents could take place in a variety of places, including on-campus, the surrounding night life, on social platforms and inside their own homes. The timeframe could also be a one-off experience or a sustained routine of harmful behaviour, and the perpetrators could either be acting independently or as part of a group.

To successfully engage a multi-demographic audience, we knew it was important to use simple, colloquial language - to make the campaign relatable. We developed a concept that centred around the idea: ‘when it feels wrong, it’s wrong’.

This statement enabled us to speak to our wide audience group by acknowledging that most of us can identify when something feels wrong – whether you’re the victim, a bystander or even the perpetrator forced to consider your own actions. We wanted this campaign strapline to act as a prompt for our audience to trust their inner voice and speak up. We then drew up a comprehensive messaging framework that tackled each of the different audience groups and harmful behaviours.

One of the creative challenges we had was to make sure the campaign wasn’t triggering or offensive. For this reason, we stayed away from images and character illustrations and opted for a bold textual based style. The idea was that the headline message represented the ‘inner voice’ of the audience member who recognised a situation was wrong. The following message was the validation statement from the University, along with a practical call-to-action of where to seek support.

We rolled out the concept across a range of online and offline touchpoints, including digital screens and printed posters, campus dressings, student email communications and student intranet sites. Each of these assets was both visually and technically accessible. We also provided the University with a campaign toolkit which included guidance around accessible colour pairings.