We decided to use Twitter, since this medium lets one communicate intensively with an enormous social circle of friends, business contacts, family or just general surfers on the web. We let a young woman named Jessica Stevens open an account on Twitter. She tweets about the fun things in her life on a daily basis. Within months Jessica has thousands of followers. After a while she falls in love. She even moves in with her new boyfriend. Weeks later however, he starts getting violent. She shares these sad episodes with her followers as well. When Jessica finally ends up in the hospital with a broken collar bone, we reveal that she is not a real person, but that her story is very real and happening every day. We finally communicate that when one notices domestic violence, the Willpower Foundation can assist with practical advice and actual help.

We asked several Dutch celebrities to dedicate one Tweet to Jessica’s story. This way we reached tens of thousands of people on Twitter alone. Furthermore, Jessica’s story stirred up a discussion among her followers, since the whole experience was quite confronting for them. Apart from this, several news media picked up on the campaign, broadening the audience reached to potentially hundreds of thousands of people. The Willpower Foundation was invited for several interviews and was able to tell their story over and over again.