imabi is a safeguarding brand that provides the technology behind a series of safeguarding apps, which are interconnected via one central imabi platform. It includes Railway Guardian, which was built for the British Transport Police to help keep people safe on the railways, as well as dedicated school, workplace and community apps, alongside an app focused on tackling issues relating to violence against women and girls (VAWG).
White Ribbon UK is a leading VAWG prevention charity, and imabi’s founder, Mark Balaam, is a White Ribbon ambassador. As a brand, imabi was keen to forge stronger ties with the charity to help cement its position in the VAWG space. The fundamentals of the campaign then, centred on raising brand awareness of imabi within that sphere as well as putting it in front of a broader consumer market.
Previous football related campaigns have demonstrated the impact football can have on domestic violence. And with the Euros set for summer 2024, imabi was keen to capitalise on this as an opportunity to support women and girls and help spread awareness of VAWG issues, while simultaneously raising the brand’s profile.
Given White Ribbon UK’s prominent voice in the sector, we reached out to propose a joint initiative with the charity.
White Ribbon’s focus is on working with men and boys to challenge cultures that lead to harassment, so we asked if they had stats to underline the prevailing culture around football. This highlighted the following:
With these statistics demonstrating the prevalence of incidents of VAWG around football they also underlined that the problem stretched beyond domestic violence, impacting women and girls who were simply watching football, too.
With the idea established and White Ribbon UK onboard, we created a version of the guide using our agency’s in-house designers. This was supplemented with a dedicated landing page on the imabi website, populated with imagery and video we’d captured. Again, turning to our in-house resources, we used our agency staff as background extras, supplemented with opinions gleaned from street voxpops.
Compiling all the assets to create a press pack for the guide, we identified key prospects to reach out to across national and regional media, as well as identifying prominent influencers who were outspoken on VAWG issues to help amplify the messaging.
Influencers who we identified as having an ideal profile included former Love Island star, Sharon Gaffka, and Heather Bowling, a prominent TikToker, who both champion VAWG prevention. Liaising with them saw them agree to promote the messaging around the guide.
The guide saw more than 200 pieces of press coverage in total (with a combined reach of 100m+), a large part of which was due to its inclusion in a PA Media round-up piece highlighting the potential for increases in domestic violence, which saw police issue a warning on the eve of the tournament.
Publications that referenced the imabi guide included the likes of ITV, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mail Online and the Evening Standard as well as dozens of regional publications.
We also secured comment pieces in the Yorkshire Post and Manchester Evening News, two of the largest regional newspapers, which saw Mark speak on crucial VAWG issues, while he also conducted radio interviews with the likes of BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio Manchester and United Christian Broadcasters.
Our influencer outreach saw Sharon Gaffka and Heather Bowling support the campaign, with both posting on their key social channels. Sharon created an Instagram collab post, tagging in imabi, which generated 1,162 likes from her 340,000 strong following.
Heather, meanwhile, created an almost two-minute long TikTok video, detailing the campaign and its key messaging, which went live on the Friday ahead of the final and, to date, has seen more than 550,000 views and 66,000 likes on the post. Furthermore, Heather changed the link in her bio to the Euros landing page on the imabi website.
These activities were supplemented further by White Ribbon UK posting on its own channels, with a collab post with imabi generating a further 346 likes.
During the tournament, the results of this press and influencer activity saw imabi’s website traffic jump by 139% when compared against the previous month, including a 170% increase in unique visitors, while downloads of the imabi Guardian app rose 267%. All of this was generated with no additional budget outside of our monthly PR retainer fee, which covers the full press office function.
"We know it’s made a real difference through conversations with White Ribbon partners who shared and used the fixtures guide far and wide. The partnership has been so successful that we put new campaigns and events together off the back of it.” – Anthea Sully, CEO of White Ribbon UK
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