This work is a follow up campaign to Signal for Help, a covert hand signal developed to help those facing gender-based violence. This campaign aimed around action aims to shift the culture around gender-based violence from one of stigma to one of support. To the topic of gender inequality that the Glass Lion represents, gender-based violence is one of the most pervasive results of inequality, leading to a woman being killed by their intimate partner in Canada every six days.

Signal for Help, created at the beginning of the pandemic, was successful at providing victims of gender-based violence with a simple hand gesture that they could use to let people know they needed help. However, a challenge remained: many people who saw it did not know how to respond.

Only 17% of people are confident that they would know what to do if asked to help. Which means that 17% of those who signal for help may encounter someone who doesn’t know how to help. The Canadian Women’s Foundation (CWF) could not just continue to raise awareness for the signal, they had to pivot and raise people’s ability to respond too.

Our brief was to continue to raise awareness for the signal while also engaging people to help them overcome their reluctance to respond.

Objectives: A further 10% increase in awareness and engaging 10,000 people to be responders.

Compared to other countries in the world, Canada experienced a much longer lockdown during the pandemic. In fact, Toronto experienced the longest indoor dining ban compared to all other major cities in the world.

The extensive lockdown in Canada created a peak in gender-based violence and a shock to the support systems in place. In 2020/2021, 557 residential facilities/shelters in Canada were primarily mandated to serve victims of abuse, and 34% of the facilities reported being impacted to a great extent during the pandemic. Canada's Assaulted Women's Helpline received 65% more calls in 2020 compared to 2019. Women At The Centre, a Toronto-based group reported a 9,000% increase in calls for help by the end of December 2021.

This revealed a systemic gap in our social services to help victims of gender-based violence in the event of another “shock” to the system and established the dire need to build community-based prevention.

If the Signal for Help was simple, visual and immediate, we needed the ability to respond to be as well. Text was our answer. We created a number – 540-540, the numerical representation of each part of the hand gesture – that Canadians could text, where they would receive a free action guide with the best ways to respond.

Knowing that people are confused about how to respond, we built a clear, simple and non-intimidating way to find out how to help. Just by texting Signal to 540540, people accessed simple and straightforward resources to guide the responder to intervene and provide help in a non-threatening and low risk way.

Overall, the creative built created enablement and action in an environment focused on raising awareness and empowering the unknowing.

Enabling those exposed to intimate partner violence to reach out for help continued to be an important task for the CWF. However, 17% of Canadians thought they didn’t know how to help or intervene when it came to intimate partner violence. Helping people reach out had to be combined with encouraging people to respond.

CWF’s approach is one of enablement and action. We used this approach to launch the signal and needed to do the same when it came to recruiting responders.

Many of the 17% are also part of the 90% of Canadians who feel they have a role to play. Showing that they have empathy, we know there must be a something stopping them from acting.

We needed to find a solution that continued to drive awareness and that leveraged people’s empathy to overcome their inactivity.

We created traction for the campaign by targeting Canadians at large and specifically reaching out to women’s advocacy groups and female influencers to help spread the word. Developing social assets without obvious branding, these groups could adopt the signal and number for their own needs and distribute to their followings the way that felt most natural. A PSA helped drive our message home to all Canadians, showing how this isn’t just a women’s issue but an issue that everyone should get involved in and help with.

We launched this campaign soon after a major media boost for Signal for Help, with notable use cases in the USA that saved the lives of two young women. By leveraging the rise in popularity, we were able to target people’s susceptibility to our message: if you saw the Signal for Help, would you know how to respond?

The Responder campaign continued to bring awareness to the Signal for Help with even more velocity than the original campaign, garnering over 2 billion organic impressions with minimal media investment, exceeding client’s benchmark by 139.69 times. Awareness of the Signal increased from 26% to 41% within Canada, which means 2-in-5 Canadians (and 48% of women) now have a covert way to call for help. The call-to-action embedded within the Signal helped mobilize 42,000 people to sign up and become responders in our efforts to fortify community-based prevention and build an empowered cohort of support in Canada, exceeding our target by 4.2 times.

Since its launch in April 2020 to date of December of 2022, the campaign has garnered 5,607,807,400+ earned impressions, $48,173,533 in earned media and 3,584,000 engagements on social.

Perhaps most importantly, since initiation, the Signal for Help has been credited with saving 7 lives across the globe.