My research & communication skills have given me the opportunity to lead the rollout of a number of successful campaigns including an international campaign developed for UNICEF – Every Child in School - which targeted a millennial audience. As the Strategy & Project Manager, I worked with UNICEF on the ‘Promoting Equity for Children’ project. This was a multi-year, 4-phase campaign including research and planning, message/asset development and testing, implementation and evaluation.

The overall aim of the campaign was to create awareness of the inequities faced by children in Nigeria. The main target audience - urban, educated, middle class Nigerian millennials in Abuja and Lagos. The campaign sought to motivate and empower this target audience to become effective advocates for child equity and take action by engaging political leaders and policy makers.

The input stage included desk research as well as qualitative and quantitative studies in Abuja and Lagos. Campaign development was based on the Communication for Development approach and the 5 steps process of analysis/research, strategic design, development/testing, implementation & monitoring/evaluation.

I managed the process of research design and implementation and the primary research included a quantitative KAP study, focus groups with millennials, IDIs with policymakers and civil society actors and multi-stakeholder workshops. The insights from the research informed the decision to narrow the focus of the campaign to access to primary education specifically. The research also indicated that millennials prefer getting information via digital channels, but that traditional media was necessary to lend credibility to the campaign.

As the communications planner for this campaign, I worked with my team to pinpoint the mediums popular with the identified and profiled target audiences & disseminated messages through various channels including developing a visual brand identity and rolling out multi-channel communications via a prime time radio program, blog articles and interactive digital content.

The results from the research process include a desk research report and communications strategy deck that informed the choice of campaign name, logo and assets for the ‘Every Child in School’ campaign. The strategic messaging was to empower young people with the information and tools to engage policy makers. The campaign used digital media, radio, cinema and television to deliver this message with emphasis on ‘millennial-friendly’ channels. Media strategy built on results from research on the preferred sources of information among urban millennial audiences.

Working with a creative team of seasoned art designers, copy writers and film producers, various elements of the campaign were brought to life;

Videos

Weekly Online Banners/GIFs/Quizzes

Radio Adverts

Sponsored radio programs and hypes

Campaign Microsite

The mainly digital campaign reached about 5.5 million unique users across 3 platforms and thousands took the pledge to support the campaign and call for a bigger budget for education. For a campaign that ran for a short period (4 months preceded by research and development), results from media monitoring and the end line KAP show that the campaign's reach & recall surpassed averages for similar campaigns in both social and commercial sector marketing. 70% of respondents recalled at least 1 campaign advert according to the end line KAP survey of a representative sample of the target audience in Lagos & Abuja.

The survey also shows definite shifts in awareness and interest among the target audience groups with a range of 2-16% higher rates of knowledge, awareness & interest in response to KAP survey questions among campaign recognizers compared to non-recognizers.