Many people don’t know how HIV is transmitted, diagnosed or treated; it’s a source of fear. Some people are even afraid of touching HIV+ people. Therefore, we built a campaign that started on World AIDS Day.

#TOUCH.

Touch and listen to the stories of HIV+ lives.

Touch and learn about tests and treatments.

Touch and give support.

Visitors of kendinicin1aralik.org touched the fingerprints on the screen and got in contact with HIV+ lives. They listened to stories about how to overcome obstacles, learned details of disease, treatments and gave support. They’ve learned one can live a long healthy life with regular tests and treatment and no need to fear.

Using mirror as a metaphor for empathy and confrontation since people see their own reflections in it, we developed and produced an interactive mirror with a touch screen. Using this mirror, we offered people a profound experience when they least expected.

We’ve specified our target audience as LGBTI, potential HIV+ individuals, patients’ and medical specialists’ associations, NGOs and the whole community.

Medical specialists’ and patients’ associations like Positive Living Association and Red Ribbon Istanbul as well as NGOs about sexual health and human rights attended our press meeting which doubled as a launch event.

We took web searches with the word “HIV” and related video/web contents for reaching potential HIV+ individuals, LGBTI individuals through Hornet, a social network for gays with 300.000 users in Turkey.

For the community, we used demographic segmentation both in digital and conventional media. We followed this multichannel communication process’ performance to choose the most efficient channels and focused on them.

Our campaign started on 1 December 2016. In first 3 months, It found a place in Hornet, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Search Ads, Display Banner Ads, Truview Ads and mainstream media like ATL channels.

Our campaign messages have reached more than 8 million people through digital and conventional media (14 print media, 53 online media, 9 TV) in the first 3 months.

Individuals who visited kendinicin1aralik.org have touched the fingerprints on their screens and watched videos with HIV+ stories more than 250K times.

Once watched the HIV+ stories videos and awared, more than 70K people willingly pledged to a text that said they were aware of HIV and stood side by side with HIV+ individuals.

Starting with an aim of raising awareness, this campaign caused 22,5% increase in “HIV” searches according to Google Turkey trends. The word “HIV”, which had a monthly average search volume of 67 on Google before 1 December 2016, has increased to 82 on average since that date.