The Racism. It Stops With Me. campaign is a well-known campaign Australia-wide created and managed by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC). The website provides tools and resources to help people and organisations learn about racism and take action to create change.
Deliverables
Video
Website
Outdoor advertising
Digital advertising
Social tiles
Brief
Our perceptions precede our actions and changing either is no small order. Racism is not just the calling of names, the throwing of judgemental looks or the shouts of an angry passenger on the train. Encircling the individual behaviors is the influence of countless cultural systems and structures under which racism festers. To help Australians see this influence, and work towards breaking free from it, Think HQ was engaged to develop the latest iteration of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s “Racism it stops with me” (RISWM) campaign.
The challenge was to refresh the RISWM campaign to incorporate awareness of structural racism and its equally sinister sister, unconscious bias.
Execution
The challenge was to refresh the RISWM campaign to incorporate awareness of structural racism and its equally sinister sister, unconscious bias. However, this call to look beyond personal behaviours and tackle social and systemic disadvantage had the potential to alienate any audience triggered by the sheer possibility that they could be inadvertently racist. So, we got creative with the approach.
We would ease Australians without lived experience of racism into a safe space for them to engage and reflect because, no matter how challenging the conversation, we need to talk about racism and the causes of inequality. Using mirrors as a key visual metaphor throughout campaign collateral, the audience would be invited to look beyond the surface and discover change is only possible when we reflect within ourselves. That reflection would begin by asking ourselves the hard questions — prompted by the 14 hero questions researched, tested, and developed by the Think HQ team. Each question would ask participants to consider their own experiences and think about the everyday advantages and disadvantages caused by racism.
It would be a starting point to ignite constructive conversations about both institutional and interpersonal racism, first with the audience themselves and then with those at their dinner table.
Outcome
The ‘Racism It Stops with Me’ campaign launched on 12 July 2022 and is still in its initial round of penetration across the media landscape with outstanding preliminary results.
Within days of launching the campaign, the Australian Human Rights Commission received 500 sign ups to the email newsletter and 40 new organizational supporters, as well as a host of empowering and supportive comments via the website ‘contact us’ form about the personal impact the CSA film had on people.
Backed by a strong PR push bolstered by engaging messaging and creative imagery, the campaign has also been picked up by numerous key mastheads including The Guardian, SBS, ABC News and The Project. Aggregated audience reach from earned media coverage in the first week of launch was 81,757,938 as of 19th July.
While measuring the impact of conversations about race will never be an exact science, we know the campaign is reaching countless Australians and planting the seeds for change.
