Every year 38,000 women in Denmark suffer domestic abuse. That’s one in 60 women.

Danner, founded in 1875, is one of Denmark’s oldest crisis centres, fighting every day to help women break free from domestic violence.

Their central message is that domestic abuse is not a private matter but something that everyone should be aware of and capable of spotting.

Getting this message across is not easy. Danner is a charity and doesn’t have any money to advertise or promote this message. Every last Krone is needed to fund its crisis centre and the help offered to residents and their 24-hour helpline.

Domestic abuse mostly happens behind closed doors, but we wanted to shine a light on the issue.

We wanted to make it real. To create an in-your-face about the harsh physical reality of domestic abuse; to help people understand what it means to hit and be hit.

Our idea: create an interactive experience that graphically showed the impact of violence. Putting our female target audience in the position of abuser.

And to drive reach the people being beaten up was Denmark’s biggest influencers on the country’s biggest social media platform, Instagram.

Our strategy was to create a compelling and realistic experience of domestic violence.

One that would go viral thanks to the backing of Denmark’s biggest female influencers.

We persuaded some of the biggest Danish influencers on Instagram – which reached a third of the population – to let the decidedly un-Danish topic of domestic violence dominate their feeds.

No more Hygge just the raw experience of beating someone up via the simple mechanism of tapping on a smartphone screen.

Our message was designed to trigger an emotional response rather than just educating our target group – getting them even more involved in the issue.

And because our influencers were actively sought out by our target audience, there was no need to support the activity with paid advertising.

We utilized the interactive potential of Instagram stories to create a unique experience.

Tap a picture of our influencers and they would bleed and bruise. Each tap showing how a beating could go on and on.

The experience was created by filming our influencers mimicking the impact of being hit before making them up with realistic cuts and bruises, based on Danner’s real-world knowledge of the impact of domestic violence.

The experience was backed up with press outreach, supported by our influencers, to ensure that we maximised the earned media coverage both on Instagram and more widely.

We reached a third of Denmark’s population and we did it 100% organically.

Our interactive Instagram experience got people involved with Danner’s work, boosting website clicks by 1840% and interactions such as calls and emails by 685%.

And that boost in contacts has continued. Two months later they are still significantly up on pre-campaign levels.

Our press outreach resulted in coverage in Denmark’s biggest magazines and newspapers, reaching an additional 1.7m (in a country of just 5.8m).

All this publicity has put the issue of domestic violence in all its forms on the political agenda and as of March this year, Parliament has made psychological violence punishable by law for the first time.