Information

SEESAC’s Awareness Raising Campaign #Don’tBeLikeJoe Seen over 18 million Times

Awareness raising around the inherent dangers of misuse of firearms and explosives is an integral part of SEESAC’s regular activities. This holiday season, we decided to focus our attention on celebratory shooting and misuse of pyrotechnics that are so common in the Western Balkans, and to do so using social media. With this in mind, we created the campaign “Celebrate with Your Heart – Not Your Gun: #DontBeLikeJoe.’

The campaign was released on 22 December 2021 and promoted via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google Ads, carefully targeting specific audiences until 20 January 2022. With a modest budget but well written copy and captivating visuals, it gained over 18 million impressions, approximately 1.3 million individuals saw it and its videos were viewed almost 3 million times.  

The campaign was based on the now robust set of data on celebratory shooting incidents available to us through SEESAC’s Armed Violence Monitoring Platform as well as on some of the knowledge products that provide analysis of the said data – including In - Focus issue, delving specifying into celebratory shooting trends.

Using this data we developed a story of Joe -  a naïve and carefree character who we follow as he makes bad choices – buying pyrotechnics for his much younger brother, shooting at a wedding, shooting at a party and taking a selfie, throwing firecrackers in the park, shooting from a balcony.  This leads him and those close to him down unwanted paths. We told Joe’s story through a series videos and visual posts.

The campaign’s striking storyline and visuals prompted several key stakeholders to promote it natively. The Ministry of Interior of the Republic of Serbia posted the entire campaign on all of their social media channels. International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) integrated it into their global advocacy effort dedicated to this issue. UNDP Eurasia’s created a captivating photo essay that incorporates the campaigns social media copy with all its visuals. UNDP Eurasia, and UNDP offices in Albania and in North Macedonia all actively supported the campaign and posted materials in their local languages ensuring higher visibility.   

The results of the advertised potion of the campaign alone include:

  • Total Impressions+ (for all channels): 18,295,705
  • Total Reach (for Facebook & Instagram): 1,287,953
  • Total Clicks (for all channels): 14,013
  • Total Video Views (for YouTube ads): 287,617
  • Total Video Plays (for Facebook & Instagram): 2,689,707


Impressons - # of times an ad appeared
Reach - # of (unique) people who saw the ad 
Clicks - # of times your ad was clicked on
Video Views - # of times someone intentional played the video and watched at least 30sec of it 
Video Plays - # of times your video started playing 

 

 

Back