Youth Work Ireland – Healthy Sexual Relationships

Challenge

To campaign for better and more fit for purpose sex and relationship education for young people across Ireland and to build support across the board for these changes. 

Approach

We devised a powerful media relations campaign drawing on data yielded from the client’s database of over 116,000 young people on their attiudes and opinions of sex education. We created stories around some of the young people’s concerns and the pitfalls of not providing adequate sex education, such as young people turning to pornography for education.

These stories were packaged up with case studies of inspiring young people who had strong personal stories and strong opinions to tell to media in a safe and empowering environment.

Results

Our campaign, which ran for over a year, kicked off with a front page editorial in The Irish Times, which resulted in hundreds of media hits and was one of the leading stories in the country for three days. We successfully placed an OPinion Piece written by a 17 year old member of Youth Work Ireland in the Irish Times and secured massive broadcast news coverage. This massive media coverage was sustained over the course of the campaign with strategic media spikes.