IndiaSocial Case Challenge – edition 2
Category: Best Short Term campaign
Title: Bell Bajao! – ringing louder against #VAW
Share a little about your organisation/ brand
Breakthrough is a global human rights organisation that uses the power of media, pop culture, and community mobilisation to inspire people to take bold action for dignity, equality, and justice. Based in India and the United States, Breakthrough addresses critical global issues including violence against women, sexuality and HIV/AIDS, and immigrant rights and racial justice.
Breakthrough’s Bell Bajao! campaign not only addressed men in the context of violence but gave ownership to intervene and effectively end domestic violence. This multimedia campaign supported with on ground youth mobilisation has reached over 130 million people in India. Bell Bajao! has become an action call to men & boys alike to step out of the role of a perpetrator and spectator of violence towards women.
Executive Summary
The Bell Bajao site that started out as a support tool for the campaign on ground has now become an important scaffold for the grassroots work and has an influential following and fan base on Facebook and Twitter. The Bell Bajao blog has acted as a platform for breaking many gender stereotypes by featuring budding female bloggers/writers, LGBT activists and many men & boys who have expressed their lack of identification with the existing concepts of masculinity and practices of patriarchy. For all these bloggers, writers and activists, the internet offers a relatively safer space to freely express themselves either on conditions of anonymity or due to the reduced degree of direct confrontation in the cyber space. Beyond Bell Bajao raising awareness and reaching out to individuals in the cyber space to contribute in the campaign, Bell Bajao is commonly mentioned as the ‘go-to’ cause/campaign for all news and views related to violence against women.
Nature of the programme/ activity/ campaign
Organisation & online community stakeholders
Duration of the said programme/ activity/ campaign. Start date-end date
October 2009 to present
Background
The Bell Bajao! online campaign was originally conceived to support the human rights and gender training as well as community mobilization activities that Breakthrough has been vigorously sustaining through various since a decade now. Bell Bajao! took a multi-dimensional approach by raising awareness about domestic violence in public service announcement (PSA) advertisements aired on national television, radio channels, gender and human rights training workshops, multimedia equipped video vans running across different districts of the country and online platforms via prominent video streaming channels like YouTube and Vimeo.
The role of social media was critical to take on the social normative values at a big scale. To create a context to raise awareness on domestic violence that would excite an unlikely audience to participate in the dialogue process. It essentially can be held responsible for bringing the issue of domestic abuse out of the closet and into the next door’s neighbour’s conscience. The Bell Bajao blog is one of the few user generated platforms that encourage the exchange of opinions, studies, experiences or personal stories on issues from gender, violence to sexuality.
Objectives
The main objective of the Bell Bajao campaign was to raise awareness on domestic violence by bringing it in the purview of mainstream discussions in platforms that have mass viewership and readership. These platforms include social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter; the blogosphere; video sharing websites like YouTube and Vimeo; and news dailies and wires (print & online).
The biggest milestone for the Bell Bajao online campaign was the micro campaign during the global 16 Days of Activism in 2010 called, 16 Days of Tweetism. In this period, more than 16 bloggers contributed unique and interesting articles on emotional abuse in romantic relationships, violence against women in political and military conflict zones like Manipur, Kashmir & Jharkhand (Naxalite region). These blogs spurred dialogues on pertinent issues of women’s rights via the engagement of online supporters (esp. men & boys) on social networking spaces like Facebook and Twitter. It encouraged a lot more people to come out of their private closets of suffering/abuse. Through Bell Bajao‘s 360 degree campaign online, Breakthrough aimed to achieve three basic and important goals to set the ball rolling on raising awareness and consciousness on domestic violence.
Youth Engagement – targeting young minds and engaging them in attractive mediums of edutainment. This defines the reason behind Bell Bajao‘s presence on Facebook and Twitter. The campaign is not just about promoting Breakthrough‘s human right approaches and work but to engage the youth with women’s rights and issues with a more casual tone and language that they can easily connect with.
Gender Rights Training – Through Breakthrough’s online training session on the site, that includes its legal implications in India that talks about Protection of Women against Domestic Violence (2005) and listed resources, Bell Bajao aimed for young individuals to gain a deeper insight on how violence against women is entrenched in social constructs of gender and patriarchy and for an intense engagement to challenge their set notions about society. The process of transformation (not dependent on an external facilitator), however, must not be limited to the direct consumer and guide the individual to raise awareness in his/her social circles like friends and family as well as in his/her community.
Endorsement of Community & Celebrity Influencers – Breakthrough also aimed to gain the support of high profile stakeholders like celebrities from the entertainment industry and local community leaders for the Bell Bajao cause as their views are influential in forming public opinions and would encourage more people from the community to speak out and take action against the issue.
Strategy and Planning
Bell Bajao agreed on and has been consistently following a minimalistic strategy of blogging and discussions/debates of the blog posts on social networking platforms. This is further supported by campaign propagations in different parts of the year such as festivals, international days, during buzzing trends of activism and human rights dialogues around the social media spaces.
International Women’s Day (2009): In recognition of International Women’s Day on March 8th, Breakthrough called on men and boys to join the fight to halt domestic violence and ‘Bell Bajao!‘ (Ring the Bell). Men & boys were asked to join the blog action week ‘It Takes Two’ from 1st March till 8th March on the Bell Bajao blog and tell their stories.
- Write about individuals whose passion, work or personal stories inspire you
- Share photographs, videos and other visual material
- Tell us who you are, include a short description of yourself
- The best blog posts have a chance to win movie tickets and flower bouquets.
- Celebrity influencers like Bollywood actor and Bell Bajao ambassador Boman Irani contributed to the campaign by lending their voices for the cause of fighting domestic violence
Bloggers were engaged as per the theme for this year’s 16 Days of Activism in 2010 that was on Structures of Violence
The strategy was devised with the purpose and goal to help start dialogues on pertinent issues of human rights, engage online supporters (esp. men & boys) via social networking spaces like Facebook and Twitter and encourage more people to come out of their private closets of suffering/abuse to make the 16 Days of Tweetism a successful campaign. Overall, through this campaign propagation take the Bell Bajao campaign to the next level of a symbol and a clarion call to end all violence against women. Bell Bajao got as many as 657 tweets and retweets and more than 16 blogs from 16 bloggers during the 16 days from 25th November to 10th December, 2010.
Stakeholders
The main stakeholders of this campaign are the ‘Youth’ – an almost equal proportion of males and females, most densely in the 18-24 age bracket (composing of college going individuals and young digital activists) and the second highest level of engagement in the 25-34 age bracket of young, economically productive professionals. They are socially and digitally very active and serve as the most influential target audience for raising awareness on different topics and issues.
The older category under youth follow closely behind on the heels of the digitally active late teens and early twenties, although they bring valuable capacities of their own because of which any campaign cannot solely rely on young adults.
For a campaign like Bell Bajao, majority of survivors of abuse have reached out from this demographic or have shared stories/instances. For this category, the resources that Bell Bajao offers in terms of helplines and advocacy toolkits keeps them engaged and optimistic about the real world differences the campaign is making and can further create.
Choice of channel/s
The site became an importance resource for all those who were seeking help for themselves or loved ones as it provided a list of helplines in the major town and cities of the country and has remained an accessible resource center to reach out to via email for any further information. Moreover, a dedicated domestic violence website allowed for raising awareness with general audience online as well as intense engagement with activists, digital natives and the youth with photography contests, blogathons, media downloadables and a multimedia version of our training toolkits that are used with. We used WordPress, because it allowed easy access to the backend of the site for moderation, content management since the issue is a sensitive one and creative freedom to make changes without a 24 on call technical support that can be less affordable for a non profit.
- YouTube: for showcasing videos of change stories from the community, the Bell Bajao ads and Breakthrough Rights Reporters program videos that show the latest community initiatives, on ground gender and human rights training workshops, community mobilization events, people who rang the bell, personal stories of change from the community and the leaders as well as re-enactment of scripts and concepts penned by the Rights Reporters themselves.
- Flickr: for pictures as it is the largest and the most inclusive platform for general users, amateur photographers as well as high end professional photographers.
- Facebook: It provides a very wide platform for raising awareness on issues, personal engagement of the user in the cause, sharing in many personal and professional networks, donation, participation in discussions and an onus to contribute in a variety of creative ways to a cause.
- Twitter: widespread virality of issues, engaging and partnering with fellow organizations, initiatives and individuals working or share strong interest in women’s rights, human rights and violence against women, visibility to and access for major funding aand corporate agencies.
Implementation
The media team and education team at Breakthrough work in close tandem on the Bell Bajao campaign online contributing towards both the concept and resources for the campaign. The media team coordinates content from the users directly in the form of blogs, tweets and photographs; from newswires, publications and research studies and from the gender and human rights expertise of the education team. In this sense, the education team generates content like knowledge and theory of domestic violence in India and resource databases of helpline numbers, case studies of domestic violence, service provider organizations, legal counseling cells etc.
The media team has provides the various platforms and tools to creatively present and disseminate this knowledge to be accessed by the user and engage individuals in conversations with them. This is done via the blog where event reports of all advocacy meetings, conferences, community mobilization and training workshops are posted; social networking platforms like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter that directly reached out to the user in his/her personal newsfeed; video sites like YouTube and Vimeo which have been instrumental in exposing Breakthrough’s on ground work and impact stories from the community. The media team has worked in close quarters with social media consultants like Blogworks, Merrymen (16 days of activism) and Brands at Large for the social media outreach strategy for the campaign.
Impact and Outcome
Google Analytics tool has been used extensively to track the number of visitors on the Bell Bajao site, the loyalty of visits, the average time spent on the site by a user, the traffic sources of the website and the content on the site that they are engaging in. The total no. of visits on the Bell Bajao site since the campaign site went live has been 59242 with an average of 116.5 visits per day and 2 minutes 30 seconds spent on the site, from the analytics of an average monthly trend. Google search engines and direct urls are the highest traffic sources for the site with keywords, ‘Bell Bajao‘ and ‘domestic violence’. The keywords and high usage of direct urls are reflective of the popularity of the campaign in familiarity with domestic violence. This also gives us a feedback that most users on the site are those who have searched for domestic violence knowledge and resources online.
Facebook insights tool is used to gain information on the proportions of youth demographics (age, location, gender) that we are reaching out to, are exposed to the content on the site that we share and all those who are participating in the discussions and micro campaigns on social networking platforms.
The Bell Bajao page engages an almost equal proportion of males (43%) and females (54%) with the highest in the 18-24 age bracket (47%) followed by the 25-34 age bracket (28%). Highest engaged Facebook users are from India, United States of America and the United Kingdom.
Various Twitter tools like Tweetreach, Twitalyzer, Tweetcloud and Tweetstats are used to measure the reach of our tweets with the number of times they have been retweeted, how many twitter followers have retweeted them, exposure rate on the number of tweeple, status of @Bell_Bajao as a social influencer and the keywords of the dialogues we’re perpetrate and participate in. During 16 Days of Tweetism (25th november – 10th December), we aimed for 800 tweets mentioning ‘#16DOT’, however, fell short by a small margin with a total of 657 tweets. However, what is important to highlight here is that our Tweet vs. Retweet pie is almost 50%. Our Twitalyzer results that showed the micro campaign had an effective reach of 4911 Twitter users.
Learnings
Bell Bajao Blog has most successfully worked with the broad youth demographic in raising awareness on the issues of domestic violence and violence against women and gaining their signification support and contribution to the Bell Bajao campaign. Secondary tools like Facebook and Twitter have worked as important scaffolds of the online campaign and became lucrative platforms for campaign propagations like 16 days of Tweetism and International Women’s Day etc, promoting the usage of resources like helplines, training sessions etc. Breakthrough continues to struggle with effective results and impact in connecting online engagement with grassroots resources, training and youth mobilization. One example of this would be mobilizing online communities to consistently participate virtually or/and by on ground presence with the video vans during its movement. The idea, however, has also been to mobilize urban, educated digital activists to participate in on ground initiatives.
The greatest challenge of Bell Bajao campaign online is the constant need of re-inventing the different ways to address issues of violence against women like domestic violence. Besides the usage of cutting edge tools, the challenge of the creative is to both captivate and engage the online audience, particularly the youth (and in our case men and boys), and also via these innovations inspire a trend of change in mindsets and attitude. Along with the challenge of conquering these lofty social media peaks, the accompanying challenge to efficiently track, measure, document and analyze the figures and testimonies against designed indicators of influence in the metrics of increase in awareness and impact as reported action taken to stop domestic violence. Some of the important insights learned as the campaign looks forward to sustaining itself online for almost three years are –
- Important to optimally and productive use the time period when certain topics are trending as that tends to draw attention in numbers. Twitter provides small windows of opportunity to gratify this and one needs to be on constant alert to amplify the noise levels on the campaign and cause in these opportunities
- Important to actively update blogs to sustain discussions. Blogs are one of the only effective ways for an important issue like domestic violence to never fall off the radar of law makers, policy makers, service delivery organizations, the youth and society in general
- All content especially for an issue like domestic violence, resources and other usable/downloadable materials on the site must always be updated and revamped to sustain the basic interest and engagement of loyal visitors. Blogs most likely ensure the new traffic to the site
- Important to have users contribute directly to the site/pages/handles for higher ownership of the cause and campaign and to be inspired (rather than manipulated) to spread the message in their online networks and social communities
- A campaign is never bigger than the cause itself
What next
Bell Bajao campaign will sustain on ground as a part of the community mobilization and leadership/capacity building workshops and trainings for another 2 years and is serving as an entry point for serious issues of violence against women like sex selection and early marriage, that are more sensitive in nature and strongly rooted in cultural and political patriarchy of the Indian society. Meanwhile, and going forward to the near future, the Bell Bajao campaign will sustain itself on the online and social media space with concurrent discussions and dialogues on the blog and the social networking sites as well as periodical connections with on ground events and stories.
Beyond the territories of the Indian sub-continent, the Bell Bajao campaign at the global level will address the issue of domestic violence in the localized contexts in foreign shores, beginning with addressing the Indian/Asian diaspora of women and youth.
In order to address the issue of domestic violence and all its implications – legal & cultural, across the globe and in localized regions, the campaign will seek out the support and contribution of local community youth, leaders and influencers and the partnership of local organizations and diaspora (desi) sites on the social web. As per our analytics and aspirations, the Bel Bajao campaign has most frequently exposed to and accessed by online youth in India, North America and the United Kingdom. This necessity arises from connecting local and contextual reality, of not only survivors of violence but the community in general, to online discussions and representations.
Testimonials
Live/post tweets of men ringing the bell:
- http://twitter.com/#!/thelinecampaign/statuses/74844519195095040
- http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=481747092509&set=a.381926817509.161916.163127752509&type=1
Victim from Abu Dhabi rescued via Twitter -
External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with strategy
Blogworks (2009), Merrymen (2010) & Brands at Large (2011)
External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with implementation.
Merrymen helped in the concept and implementation of 16 Days of Tweetism during 16 Days of Activism, 2010
Suitable Title
Bell Bajao! – ringing louder against #VAW
Fact Sheet
Name of the company: Breakthrough’s ‘Bell Bajao!’ campaign
Category: Non-profit/NGO
Case Submitted by: Breakthrough
Website: www.breakthrough.tv
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