How to Create Your Own Photo Campaign (International Women’s Day Celebration)

The 8^th of March is International Women’s Day.
Since its inception in 1911, the day has been used as a platform to strive for equality
and more generally to celebrate the amazing women of the world, past and
present.

This year, the theme for International Women’s Day is #BalanceforBetter,
encouraging everyone to add their voice to the call for better gender balance,
whether that’s in the board room, representing us in the highest government offices,
or removing sexism from everyday life. IWD are calling for everyone to post a
selfie with their hands out, like scales, to represent the balance theme.

How to Create Your
Own Successful Visual Campaign

This is not the first time IWD have tried out a visual
campaign. Last year’s theme was #PressforProgress
and after its success, it’s not hard to see why they’d try a similar premise
with a new theme this year. Let’s look at how you can start thinking about creating
your own visual campaign.

What’s Your Goal?

If your goal is something along the lines of ‘go viral’ then
it’s probably best to stop there. Your campaign should come out of something
you’re genuinely passionate about and believe can do some good. Create
something meaningful and engaging, and liking, commenting and sharing, should
hopefully come (at least in part) organically.

Visual Content Performs Better

It really does, across almost all platforms. Video tends to
get the most engagement on the major social media channels (Facebook and Twitter)
but posts with photos on the whole get noticed and shared more, so it’s
important to get your images right.

Different Content Across Different Channels

It can be a bit of a faff, but I promise you it’s worth
slightly altering and adjusting your photographs depending on where you’re
intending to post them. If you upload something large onto Facebook,
it’s going to get compressed and potentially not look very nice. Twitter
is better, but there are still ideal sizes to upload at, so do a bit of
resizing before you post your images.

What Are You Asking?

Don’t ask for anything too complicated. We can all get lost
in the excitement of a campaign without realising that, actually, it’s probably
too big an ask for people to attempt in their busy lives. The success of the
IWD campaigns is that many people have their phones on them and enjoy taking
selfies – it’s not such a big leap to ask them to take a selfie in a particular
pose.

Try to think of things that are going to be really simple for people to
take time out of their schedules to do. If you’re trying for another selfie
idea, think of things that will have visual appeal, like being in front of
their town’s local landmark, or even just a group of friends jumping.

Why Should They Do It?

Once you’ve figured out the ‘what,’ it’s time to consider
the ‘why.’ Why should people do what you ask? There’s no one right answer for
this, but there are certainly things to consider that will help. Doing
something for a good cause is a great reason for people to get involved, just
like IWD do. Telling a story is another great reason; people like to feel like
they’re part of something, most of us crave community in some way or another,
and being a part of a campaign can really help people to feel like they’re
involved in something special.

Respond and Engage

The smart social media accounts of the present aren’t just
posting great content, they’re listening to and responding to their fans. If
you ask someone to go out of their way to take part in your campaign then don’t
ignore them once they have. You might not have the time to respond to every
single comment, and that’s okay, but try to engage as much as is possible, and
share the best responses from people – in a ‘snake eating its own tail’ kind of
way, content will generate content… you just have to get it rolling.

Together, We\’re Better

There\’s nothing quite like the feeling of uniting to support a good cause. It creates a sense of community, it inspires and educates, and most importantly helps the cause you\’re promoting. We hope you have success with your own visual campaign, and that you\’ll join us in celebrating the wonderful work of women everywhere during this International Women\’s Day 2019.

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