This Girl Can Inspire with digital

How an online community kick-started a national campaign motivating women to get more active.

How an online community kick-started a national campaign motivating women to get more active.

by Kate Dale, Head of Brand and Digital Strategy, Sport England

This Girl Can started with two striking statistics. Two million fewer women than men play sport regularly, yet 7.5 million women tell us they want to be more active. As the government organisation responsible for promoting and developing grassroots sport, this presented Sport England with both an opportunity and a challenge.

There’s a deep well of potential participants to draw from, but to do this successfully we need to properly understand and address what was holding so many women back. But we may be the people least capable of identifying with the women who didn’t really think sport is for them.

Unsurprisingly, self-selection means many of my Sport England colleagues are the type to take on triathlons, extreme marathons and Tough Mudder runs. That’s why they work in sport. They love it and can’t understand why anyone doesn’t. It’s a bit like my inability to comprehend why someone doesn’t crave ageing, veiny and malodorous cheese. What’s not to love?

So to describe This Girl can as a behaviour change campaign is doubly right. We’re seeking to change our routines and habits — the way we describe, discuss and deliver sport — as well as those of the women we’re trying to connect with. We have to go where they are now — emotionally and physically — not where we wish they were.

Research has helped us to find this starting point. We identified fear of judgement as a common thread. Mothers felt bad for taking time away from their families; women worried about their appearance during or after sports (red-faces, frizzy hair, sweat and lycra); and many felt that they simply weren’t fit enough to get fit.

Our creative response has been a multi- media campaign that celebrates active women everywhere. With nary a Photoshop touch-up in sight, our TV, cinema and out-of- home ads show real women (sourced from street-casting) doing their active thing in all its authentic, sweaty and jiggley glory.

Our images of real, flawed bodies you don’t usually see on TV or billboards were combined with a kick-ass Missy Elliot track and sassy straplines such as ‘Sweating like a Pig. Feeling like a Fox,’ and ‘Damn right I look hot.’ Our ads have allure, authenticity and attitude in equal measure.

Our digital strategy focused on taking our content and conversation to where women already were, rather than brining them to us.

But the This Girl Can campaign isn’t just about paid media and beautiful ads. From the start we recognised that our digital and social platforms needed to engage with the women and girls who wouldn’t normally come within a hot, skip and a jump of a sport- focused website.

The temptation is to build a website with all the information anyone could need to get started in any activity they might have the impulse to try. But they already exist. If you want to know how go from the couch to 5k, perform the perfect push up, train for triathlon transitions or develop your downward dog there are multiple sites and apps to help.

There’s also a plethora of online communities where you can discuss the intricacies of your favourite sport with fellow devotees, exchanging tips and cultivating a wonderful sense of togetherness.

These may be fantastic for fanatics but less appealing to women such as myself (and our target audience) whose main school sport memory is being a netball goalkeeper, forced to remove her glasses in case they got broken. Looking back, this may have been more akin to bullying than a proper sport, but it’s an off-putting memory nevertheless.

And of course this is about increasing the amount of time women spend being active, not looking at their screens. We didn’t want a website with endless pages to read. So our digital strategy focused on taking our content and conversation to where women already were, rather than brining them to us.

In the two months leading up to the launch of our ads, our social media team found twitter posts and conversations relating to sport, the gym and being active. We gave female tweeters kudos when they posted about a successful work-outs and encouragement when they talked about being too cold, tired, busy or lethargic to join in. Our tone of voice was light, supportive and humourous. We used our #thisgirlcan hashtag. We didn’t preach, broadcast or promote, but talked to the women on their own terms.

We created and shared our own content on Facebook and Twitter via ‘that’s me’ moments. These showed women how common those private fears are and what it feels like to overcome them. We used teasers and stills from our ad, snappy mantras and a sense of humour to engage them in the campaign before it got going.

The website itself is a curated collection of these and other relevant conversations. We’ve also used it to share the background stories of the real women in our ads (proving they’re not actresses and models) and to help women discover the numerous ways they can actually get active. We don’t tell you all about running, cycling, zumba or hula hopping. But we do tell you, briefly, why it’s fun, what you might get out of it and where you can go for more information.

We’ve attracted attention which we must now turn into action.

All this preparation meant that by the time the ad launched in the middle of Coronation St on 12 January 2014, we already had a core constituency of followers ready to spread the message. And the results have been spectacular.

At the time of writing (ten days after launch), over 11 million people have viewed the ad on Facebook and YouTube. The #thisgirlcan hashtag has trended twice on Twitter and been a Google hot trend. Since the launch we’ve had over 31,000 mentions on Twitter — two mentions every minute of every day and more than 100,000 people are following us on our social media channels.

This, of course, is just the beginning. We’ve attracted attention which we must now turn into action. But by taking This Girl Can into our women’s lives and virtual communities we’re ready to take the next step.