How we developed our campaign

Hello! Brook's campaign volunteers here. Our campaign is the creation of 10 amazing young minds. Here's some info on how 'Big Issues don't have to be a Big Deal' was born...

Five of us got started in September 2009, to create an exciting new national sexual health campaign to run over the next two years. Our induction at Brook gave us some necessary training for how to develop the campaign. We learnt about research skills, project management, team building and sexual health.

My favourite part of the campaign journey was right at the beginning, when we came up with the aim for the campaign, it felt good to know that we could work on something that we created ourselves. - Alaina

Choosing the campaign subject

We thought about what mattered to us and what we, our friends and people around us had experienced personally. We also researched current issues, charities and campaigns relating to sexual health, especially those targeted at young people. We also had a think about what sexual health messages we received or were out there. We concluded that a lot of sexual health messages aimed at young people only instruct us to not have sex or to use condoms. We need more campaigns that consider the experiences, thoughts and feelings of young people, in other words - its not all biology.

Through reporting back in our team on our research we realised that different pressures affected young people and our thoughts and feelings about sex. Peer pressure is one we all know about, but media (including TV adverts, gaming and porn) stereotypes, both positive and negative, as well as other pressures can affect us.
So we investigated more, did lots of research and visited Brook centres across the UK, chatting to staff and young people...

Travelling around the country to see how young people felt about issues that affected them was one of my favourite parts of the campaign. I really didn't expect some of the answers we got! - Rori

I really enjoyed going around the UK and visiting Brook centres in e.g. Belfast and Oldham. Meeting the knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff was great motivation for us, being new to Brook. And I like train rides - Becks

Creating the documentary was a fantastic experience. Finding out about young people's views and how they experience gender as well as learning about the time-consuming filming processes - definitely one of the best things we did since starting the campaign - Josina

The thought process:

So, our vision was set:

We want young people to have the self esteem and confidence to resist pressure and to make informed choices about their sexual health and relationships.

The key components of the campaign are:

Openess and honesty

• Making it okay to talk about sex and relationships

Individuality

• Promoting the importance of the individual and in doing so breaking down stereotypes, challenging negative stereotypes of young people

Information

• Dispelling myths and making accurate non-bias information available

Five new volunteers

The team got bigger in January 2010, five more volunteers joined. The ten volunteers split into five teams of two to make the campaign run smoothly.

I love when the whole group gets together to circulate ideas about how big and bold we can make it. Everyone's so diverse and unique - when we all get together and give our input the best ideas are formulated. However, it can all get a bit frustrating and heated deciding which ideas to use... but that's a good problem to have. - Tan

We've had training sessions that equipped us with skills and helped us push the campaign through different channels. For me the best part of the campaign has been when we had media training. It gave real insight into how to answer difficult questions, and how to push the campaign as much as possible. It was also fun to pretend to be famous for the day on radio and TV. - Dimple

Getting creative

We got help with the creative side of the campaign by inviting different agencies to show us what they've done with other campaigns. Agencies we liked were invited back in January to show us their ideas based on the brief we wrote for them

When we had agencies come into our office and pitch to us, I felt like Peter Jones from Dragons Den. As we all wrote comments and had the final say on which agency we picked. - PJ

We chose Baber Smith as the agency we wanted to work with, based on their pitch and how well their ideas worked with our campaign brief. This was a long process for them, thinking about the different pitches, holding different focus groups and consulting with the rest of the team.

Making a decision on which agency to pick was difficult - we hoped our decision would be the right one both for the success of the campaign and that the wider team would be happy with our decision and be able to work with the agency we chose. -Lindsay

What I've most enjoyed about the campaign are the creative moments where we've had the opportunity to generate ideas in pushing the campaign forward. The difficulty of this is that when you think big, there are compromises we must make in order to stay within our budget and time constraints. - Fatima

One of the best things we did was our photo shoot at Hampstead Heath it was something that everyone got to do together and we had fun as well. - Lindsay

To find out more about us please click here.