Youth Against AIDS is a successful, well established NGO whose mission it is to provide a young audience with all the knowledge necessary to enjoy their sexuality in a fulfilling, inclusive and, above all, safe manner. Up until now, their activities have mostly consisted of educational campaigns, workshops and events as well as smaller sexual health giveaways like condoms and flyers. Realizing that there was the potential to make a much larger impact by utilizing the resources of the state, they asked us to help develop a campaign to influence the sexual health education in German schools. And because their own resources were limited, they asked us to do so on a tight budget.

Sex education in Germany is very outdated. It is dependent on a bureaucracy that makes quick changes impossible.

FAQ YOU solved this problem. With their eponymous book that answered teenager’s frequently asked questions about sex and love, and an innovative website: faqyou.com. Both have been a success amongst teens, the associated TikTok channel is now up to a reach of 6 million people.

The Ministry of Health wanted to collaborate on an e-learning platform. Today, hundreds of thousands of students are using their platform.

FAQ YOU achieved radical changes with these projects and gave teenagers the sex education they deserve.

Because the objective was so ambitious and our budget was limited, we decided on an all or nothing approach. Rather than just add a few more official workshops to our portfolio, we wanted to revolutionize the way that sex and love are talked about in German sex-ed classes. And because we knew how tedious and expensive it was to work towards such a change within the system, we decided to go around it. We anticipated that, if we could just show our target audience that a different kind of sexual education was possible, they would do our work for us and pressure their schools and teachers to adapt. That meant producing modern, approachable and inclusive educational content that our target audience could relate to and delivering it to them in a way that they felt comfortable with. That is how FAQ YOU was born.

Although we ultimately needed to convince the people shaping the education system in Germany, our strategy was to target them via the actual target audience of sexual education: teens and young adults between the ages of 13 and 23. Knowing that this audience in particular is confronted with a vast amounts of sexually explicit content on the internet, we decided to launch our campaign via a more discrete, private and ultimately also more confidence inspiring medium: a book.Once we had established our trustworthiness and created a first swell of attention, we capitalized on our success by expanding into the digital space. Only after we had created a strong and active community on- and offline did we start to target deciders within the German government, offering to provide our expertise.

The book was produced and launched with the help of a number of popular German influencers, youtubers and twitch-streamers. This allowed us to create a pretty significant media resonance without having to expend a lot of resources while also guaranteeing authenticity and reliability within our target audience. A streamlined launch campaign with select events as well as OOH and digital assets added to the initial buzz and made sure the book was a success – both commercially and as a free giveaway to schools. About a year later we launched the website in a similar way, focussing on digital media in particular and supplementing it with social media activities, especially on TikTok. This is where (allegedly) the German minister of health became aware of our initiative and asked us to cooperate. In a process that continues till today, we then developed a database with teaching materials that can

The initial book was sold over 20.000 times and remains popular even today. Since its launch, it has been almost universally praised by educators and students alike and used in countless sex-ed classes across Germany. Out TikTok Channel, which was launched in conjunction with the website, has a reach of over six million people and also continues to grow at a rapid rate. Our main accomplishment (and the reason why we set this whole project in motion in the first place) is the cooperation with the German ministry of health. Besides another significant boost in visibility it has allowed us to cooperate directly with hundreds of schools across the country to design modern sexual education classes while reaching hundreds of thousads of teachers and students through the publicly accessible database on which we provide teaching materials and further support.