Preventing Teen Dating Violence (Case Study)
Thao Nguyen
Project Overview
The Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities joined together with Breaking Silence, a Project Safe initiative to bring more exposure to a free and anonymous text line service aimed at youth and teens. The text line offers guidance for young individuals in helping navigate tough relationship issues in order to prevent teen dating violence.
The Audience
The audience is African American youth ages 14-18 in Athens-Clarke County Georgia, including LGBTQ individuals.
Issues and Obstacles
- African American Youth in poverty stricken areas are unequipped with navigating toxic relationships.
- LGBTQ+ individuals are even less likely to reach out due to stigma.
- This was a relatively low budget campaign meaning large exploration was limited.
The Process
The process in developing this campaign included audience research, visual direction development, and message testing.
Initial Brainstorming
I initially started with a brainstorming session in collaboration with the communications research team in order to narrow down our goal and message. Additional research was conducted afterwards by the research team in order to narrow down the reason why many African American youths don't reach out for help with their relationships.
Discovery
The research team conducted surveys and interviews in order to narrow down the obstacles that kept many teenagers in the targeted area from reaching out for advice and help when it came down to the negativity involving their relationship. These obstacles included (but not limited to):
- Concerns with finance: a lot of members of this group were unaware that there is a free resource available to them
- Privacy: a lot of members of this group that identified as LGBTQ+ were not "out" yet, thus seeking help was hard in order to keep their sexual orientation private. There was also concerns of trust on whether the information they shared would be shared with others.
- They don't know what they don't know: simply not being able to identify toxic traits with their relationship made it hard for them to know when to reach out.
Establishing Campaign Messages
The ideas from brainstorming was narrowed down through research leaving two chosen messaging concepts.
Love Takes Guts
Courage, bravery, trust, and instinct are necessary attributes for cultivating the communication skills that build healthy relationships. This includes the ability to self-reflect and recognize when something in a relationship feels “off”, and drawing on attributes that resonate with our target audience to reach out for help. We use this strategy to connect youth with the CTA (usage of the Textline).
True Love Talks
This concept emphasizes the importance of talking about relationship challenges or other concerning aspects as a cornerstone of healthy relationships. It counters the shame, stigma, and silence that contributes to teen dating violence, and normalizes help-seeking as an essential attribute of healthy relationships. The campaign uses “talk” to mean speaking up about challenges, connecting with the Textline for support, and maintaining communication with a partner.
Concept to Testing
With the research results and campaign messages in mind, I started drafting a couple of thumbnails of the campaign concept poster which eventually led to the drafts and version 1 of the concepts. I also sought guidance from the client themselves on their opinions on the creative approach. Their main concern was not knowing how to represent a marginalized group in an environment that might not be a safe space for them. I kept their concerns in the back of my mind while creating these initial drafts before sending it off for A/B testing and audience interviews.
For the posters, we made sure to emphasize that this is a free, anonymous, near-peer texting service. This was to help give concerning details up front so the audience would know the cost, that their information will be kept private, and that the people at the end of the other line aren't adults or psychiatrist, they are trained individuals close to their age in order to add a level of trust.
Testing Results
2 surveys and 2 sets of interviews were done to gather data on the reaction to the poster and to narrow down which concept we should further refine. We found that depending on the group, their reaction to the posters were different. While both groups were groups of teenage black youth, the group who came from broken homes, who had low self-esteem, and were part of an after school program were overall negative and were not willing participants. Getting a response from this group proved to be difficult as their outlook on their relationship was overall negative and incapable of change no matter what concept was brought to them. While the group who was more well adjusted pointed to True Love Talks as the more successful campaign due to its straight forward nature. They clearly knew from looking at it that what was being presented to them was a text line service. They made suggestions on how to make it better and I proceeded to refine the True Love Talks concept.
I would like to add that the unresponsive group reminded me of my own high school peers. Kids who overall did not view relationships positively and saw efforts to prevent domestic violence as useless.
Refining True Love Talks
I spent some time refining True Love Talks and finalized the design with the client approval. The final design has a lot more text and wording than I would like but I wanted to reach a good common ground with myself, the client, and the audience.
Requested changes include:
- Darkening the skin tone
- Adding an example text conversation
- Adding additional social media and call to action
- Updating wording and language to be better suited for a younger audience
Results
In addition to the poster, social media posts and print collateral materials was also created. Metrics was taken afterwards and the number of texts that was sent to the text line had doubled. The client found this to be a large success and I was happy that more teens were turning to the text line for help.
Key Takeaways
Compared to a lot of other campaigns, this project had a much smaller budget. However, it was a huge passion project for me and I was happy with how it turned out. I loved collaborating with research and audience testing to create a wonderful campaign message. We created a message that counter the shame and stigma that came with reaching out for help out of a toxic relationships. We encouraged our audience to reach out BEFORE things are too late in order to foster a happy healthy relationship. It goes to show that research and design is a match made in heaven.
