Brisons le Silence! (Break the Silence!) Launch Prep: Week 1

L to R: Moi, DJ Mix, Kajeem,
Veronique and Monika (IRC Women's Empowerment Office)

I am amazed at how efficient the team is here. Thankfully we hired this wunder-kid named Issouf Fofana locally a few months ago, and he has checked nearly all of our “wish list” off one by one, including the participation of several actresses, celebs, the soccer star Kolo Toure, and pop stars to promote our campaign and message.  


But let me back up a bit. What exactly am I doing here?  We're launching a social marketing campaign to combat violence against women. When I came the last time to train the staff in the fundamentals of a creating a social marketing campaign, we went through the process of audience segmentation, that is determining our target audiences as well as the potential messages for the campaign, based on focus groups we had previously conducted around the country.  Using that info, in conjunction with a 2010 baseline survey by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine on the prevalence and type of violence in CI, as well as a literature review completed for the IRC in 2010 by Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Laurie Ball on the efficacy of social norms marketing to combat gender based violence, we determined that intimate partner (domestic) violence was the most common form of violence against women.  We would target 2 audiences: 1) housewives, ages 18-35, and 2) men ages 18-35. The men, it must be noted, are what we call the “lowest hanging fruit,” i.e. not the perpetrators but the good guys, who need to act as supporters for women and act as messengers to promote the idea that violence is not acceptable in the home.

For each of the target groups, we came up with 10 possible messages targeting both the desired action, that is reporting violence or supporting the reporting of violence, and the ideal social norm, that is the idea that the target group’s peers are all on board that violence is not acceptable or condoned.

After testing the messages in each of the regions of the country where IRC agents work, we came up 2 messages for each group.

For the women the action message is:

      1)    Brave femme, lèves-toi contre la violence! (Brave woman, stand up against violence!)

     2)   And the norms message: Chez-nous, la violence n’a pas sa place! (In our home -also reads as community- there is no place for violence.) 

For the men:

     3)    Protéger les femmes, c’est aussi notre affaire! (Protect women, it’s our business too!)

    4)    Nous sommes une équipe contre la violence. (We’re a team against violence.)

Interesting cultural note--The director of the IRC here in Cote d’Ivoire (who is French) was insistent that “Brave femme” had a negative connotation. This may be the case in France, but here in Cote d’Ivoire it has only positive connotations, as it was the favorite choice of all 12 regions by the target group.

Jean Noël Bah Gbehi’s firm JNB Productions will do all the production of both TV and print. He has already designed the logo, and made several incarnations of the posters and billboards—I’ll show the ones when they are final, but here is the logo nonetheless.  We’ll also be producing t-shirts, bracelets, bumper stickers, and calendars, all strategically placed depending on the audience, and whether they are action or norms messages.

Oh dear, did I mention our launch event is in less than a month and we need to fill a 4,000 seat venue at the Palais de Culture? Judging by what I’ve seen so far, I think we can do it. The launch event will include an introduction the campaign, speeches from ministers (oh lord, let them be brief!) hopefully the First Lady of CI, a dramatic sketch, a testimonial from a woman who stood up against violence, and some great music (saved for last of course!)

Nash recording  in studio.

Ahh, the music—Issouf managed to convince 3 of Cote d’Ivoire’s most popular musicians to come together to produce a song for the campaign.  We went to the studio last week, which looked more like coconut shack than a studio from the outside! Inside, we met --- the engineer, and artists Kajeem and Nash had already laid down the base track for the song. DJ Mix arrived later, and he assured us he would keep it on message. (He recorded the huge hit “Le Bobaraba” also a dance, about a passion for “huge derrieres” several years ago.)  I'll post the final song when it's done.

Thursday, we recorded the first set of radio sketches for the campaign launch. I peeked in at the actors’ rehearsal and it was really impressive to watch—these are true professionals—one suggestion and boom, they nailed it.  

Finally, if that wasn’t enough excitement for my first week here, My boss, Monika Bakayoko-Topolska, the head of the IRC’s Women’s Empowerment Program, and Issouf, our campaign manager, took a meeting with one of West Africa’s biggest mobile companies Moov, and managed to snag a huge sponsorship to cover all of our billboards and the cost of our TV ads.  This is HUGE, not only from a budget perspective but considering over half of the country’s nearly 22 million people own a cell phone, we can now easily implement messaging and interactive participation via mobile tech.

Actors rehearsing sketch.

Roger is producing all the radio spots and
sketches for the campaign.

The only reason I had time to write this was because due to the Africa Cup last night (CI didn’t win) we have a day off—of course I was the last to know, par for the course. : )