´Raparigas da Bola` (Ball Girls) is an advocacy group that fights to give more visibility to women in sports.

After the success of last year’s campaign, Raparigas da Bola wanted a new idea to fight for gender equality in sports, to be launched during International Women's Day 2022.

With no budget to work with, we also had the challenge of coming up with an idea that could convince athletes, journalists, and influencers to take part in the movement and spread the word to a wider audience.

For the first time, we gave the Portuguese the opportunity to see the biggest sports newspaper in the country covering only female athletes, proving that there is more than plenty of female-athlete news that’s worthy of making the front cover.

For 5 days in a row, during the week of International Women’s Day, Raparigas da Bola changed the status quo of news outlets.

They did so by taking advantage of AR - Augmented Reality - which allowed everyone who accessed www.raparigasnabola.pt to have the experience of seeing and sharing the news of the day of Portugal's biggest-selling Sports Newspaper with female-athlete only content.

If the newspaper wouldn’t give column space to women athletes, then we would, but not by brute force, but with intelligence.

Sadly, too many people claim that there’s much less column space for women in sports media outlets because there’s no good content or newsworthy stories. We decided to prove them wrong.

We used the technology of augmented reality to make it possible to see women athletes in the news.

Seeing is believing, and, through the campaign, we were able to help people to really see that there’s no lack of news-worthy, female-athlete news, whilst putting pressure on the biggest selling sports newspaper in the country to start giving column inches to female athlete as well front cover features.

We created a website with a AR technology, whereby people could easily turn the news of the day into female-only news, without the need to download an app. They simply needed to access our intuitive landing page, point their cell phone at the front page of the newspaper, and they’d see the same cover but with female athlete content.

We partnered with two female journalists who helped us to create fresh and relevant content for the cover.

Every day during the week of International Women’s Day, we launched our own version of the newspaper front cover by turning the original cover into a code that the cell phone camera could recognize and replace the news with our female-athlete version.

During the experience, the user’s phone recorded a video, and when the user turned off the camera, a message invited the user to share the video on social media.

Within just 5 days, one augmented-reality website, and with the collaboration of two female journalists, the NGO was able to give visibility to 35 different teams and 244 female athletes from 13 different sports, proving that there’s no lack of news-worthy, female-athlete stories out there.

Lots of influencers took part in the movement, helping the idea to have more than 5 million impacts on social media, which represents half of Portugal's population. Some of the most-followed Portuguese influencers and athletes shared the videos of their experience on the website.

The pressure was such that in the following two weeks, female athletes were the main feature of the newspaper - something that the newspaper had never done before.