Using Social Prior to the Campaign

Sport England complemented their use of traditional forms of research, such as focus groups, with analysis of social media conversations. This proved a successful approach, as social analytics uncovered more honest, unsolicited opinions of women’s views on exercise. Kate Dale, Head of Brand and Digital Strategy at Sport England, noted that social analytics provides a “snapshot into people’s lives”, highlighting its relevance in the campaign planning phase.

Six months before #ThisGirlCan went live, the team at Sport England took to social to analyse the conversations that were going on around exercise by women in the UK. Social analytics provided useful insights into the kinds of conversation that was happening, allowing Sport England to really delve deeper into the conversation, and identify key trends.

They found that there were over 10 million posts made by women over the year of 2014 referring to sport/exercise, and that these conversations surrounded numerous types of sport. From football to zumba, and cricket to cycling, it was clear that women have an interest in sport and often talk about it.

Understanding The Target Audience - 3 Key Pillars

Once this was established, the next step was to analyse social data to really understand what was happening in between speaking about exercise, and actually taking part in exercise.

Turning to social allowed Sport England to uncover a number of things that led to the success of the campaign. First off, they were able to identify three key pillars of conversation between women in the UK:

1. 14-24 year olds were most put off by their appearance or how they look when exercising.
2. Mothers felt guilty that they were spending time exercising instead of with their families, but on the other hand felt guilty at not being a good enough role model by showing that exercise is not important.
3. The rest of women were battling between worrying that they were either not good enough to take part, or that they were too good and would show others up.

Key Themes Emerge

Sport England were also able to identify key themes emerging from social conversation:

[Download PDF to see Graph]

As the data shows, whilst women talk about barriers that get in the way of exercising, they also really look forward to it, as well as feeling overwhelmingly positive afterwards.

The main obstacle getting in the way of women and girls, across all ages in the UK from exercising was fear of judgement. This then constituted the basis for the the #ThisGirlCan campaign.

Not only did social analytics play a vital role in establishing what kinds of conversations were happening, they proved worthy in terms of developing the tone and language that was used throughout the #ThisGirlCan campaign. Sport England’s approach was that being patronising towards women doesn’t work and that empathy was the key to success.

Remembering this both in their advertisements and when conversing directly with women over social media sites, Sport England’s friendly, encouraging tone of voice remained consistent, and was proven successful.

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The Results

#ThisGirlCan was extremely successful with both a “clamorous reception on social media” and a huge viewing of their TV ad.

Through our insights, Sport England highlighted that empathy was the key to success.

Football: From Watching to Playing & Conversation Volumes about Training

In addition, we can see the attitude and behaviour change across social conversations. The volume graph illustrates the difference between women talking about watching football in comparison to women talking about playing football. The 2014 spike coincides with the World Cup, but in 2015 we see that conversation about playing football is greater than conversation about watching it.

[Download PDF to see Graph]

Similarly, conversation surrounding training spiked after the campaign, when compared to 2014.

[Download PDF to see Graph]

Impact for Sport England

In addition, we also analysed the impact of the campaign for the Sport England brand.

[Download PDF to see Pie Charts]

As we can see, prior to #ThisGirlCan the main topics surrounding Sport England were quite generic: Funding, Football, Day of Sport. After the campaign there’s a clear alignment with #ThisGirlCan and a lot of positivity associated with the brand.

In addition, we can see an increase in the number of female social media users talking about Sport England.

Impact for Sport England

[Download PDF to see Map]

The campaign went far and wide, as we can see in the map. The ad was only played on British television but social knows no barriers and enabled the conversation to carry the empowerment message to many other countries and languages.