Autumn 2014
The challenge
While most crime types were dropping in Greenwich, the borough still had the third highest levels of domestic violence in the capital. The year beforehand Royal Borough of Greenwich had developed a campaign to raise awareness, focusing in particular on raising awareness of domestic violence during international football tournaments. They commissioned us to provide strategic evaluation and insight into how to develop the next phase of the campaign.
How we approached it
We carried out around 400 surveys across three specific parts of the borough that were felt to be especially vulnerable: Eltham, Thamesmead and Plumpstead. We followed these up with some more qualitative work. The framing of a social marketing campaign can often mean that it fails by assuming people know too much or too little. So, our aim was to target hotspots and then to evaluate firstly whether messages were reaching the right people, but secondly whether the messages were the right ones.
What happened
Our findings showed that there was, indeed, an issue with the framing of the message. People were not responding to the call-to-action, partly because there was a fairly crude and old-fashioned idea of what domestic violence constituted, and partly because the right demographic groups were not being reached. In particular, the Asian community and young people were not being reached, and men tended to be less likely than women to acknowledge things like psychological or financial forms of abuse. We recommended that the campaign message – and especially the perpetrator message – be honed to make it more remedial.