Social media campaign in Kinshasa reaches 100k views

In December we posted a story about our animation, Neighbours, which reached over 97,000 Facebook views in DRC’s capital, Kinshasa. Our second animation was even more successful, attracting 114,000 Facebook views and over 13,000 likes in just four days. ​

The video tells the story of a young girl who is forced to care for her many siblings at a young age, and so misses out on her education. Later in life, based on her own experience, she and her partner decide to use family planning services so that she can pursue opportunities in the future. Unlike our first campaign, this animation is more strongly targeted at younger audiences and tries to highlight the impact that having many children too early can have on young women’s participation in society.

Given that the target audience of our campaign is underrepresented on social media, we decided to follow a different strategy to our first animation launch. By specifically targeting our adverts at different age groups and working with local celebrities and youth idols, we managed to reach a slightly younger audience than in our first, more generic campaign, with 25% of our audience aged 13-24. More importantly, this strategy generated a much higher engagement: our second video received almost twice as many comments (>600), and significantly more shares and likes, than the first. It even generated enough of a buzz to be picked up by other platforms, such as Voice of Congo, who promoted our ad on their instagram feed.

We are now planning to continue the campaign with some simple images and messages reinforcing the general message, in line with our theory of Saturation+, which stipulates that behaviour change campaigns are most effective if audiences are exposed repeatedly over a longer period of time. To achieve full saturation, we have also launched the animation on TV, broadcasting five times a day on six channels.

Watch our Big Sister animation and learn more about our family planning campaign in DRC