Only 24 U.S. states mandate sexual or reproductive health education in public schools, and only 13 of those states require that information to be medically accurate. With more than half of the public school student population identifying as Black, Latinx or mixed race, this creates an unprecedented sex ed knowledge gap for Black and Latinx teens, particularly in conservative communities.

When teens do receive sex education, it often excludes important topics like contraception, consent, and LGBTQ+ identity. Many teens are uncomfortable talking to doctors or parents, so they instead turn to unreliable peers or the Internet as a source of information.

Planned Parenthood delivers vital reproductive health care, sex education, and information to millions of people around the world. They set out to close this knowledge gap by creating an accurate, anyonymous mobile sex ed chatbot—Roo—and getting it into the hands of the teens who need it most.

Roo launched with a first-of-its-kind YouTube series that helped Planned Parenthood bring sex ed into the 21st century.

The series was co-created with a diverse group of Gen Z influencers and real teens of different races, ethnicities, genders, identities, abilities and sexual orientations. It includes info you’d find in a typical sex ed or reproductive health curriculum plus new, important topics that modern teens deal with—all delivered in a playful, real way.

Our videos covered four topics: Relationships, Bodies, Sex, and Identity. No judgment, no exclusivity. Just real questions and influencers, with Roo as their non-judgmental, all-knowing sidekick.

The goal was to build a trustworthy peer-to-peer connection between teens and the bot. We held a writing session with teenagers to incorporate their questions and worked with Gen Z content creators to make the videos as engaging and authentic as possible.

What we learned from speaking directly to our audience via focus groups and listening sessions was that they’re already asking all the right questions, just not in the right places. They stated researching online, reading posts social media posts, conversing with friends and watching porn as ways to find answers on sex and reproductive health.

Pulling information from all these not-quite-reliable sources, they naturally don’t know what to trust. So our goal was not just to normalize asking questions, but also shift their behavior to asking the right sources.

Our core target, like most teens, is skeptical of PSA advertising. We needed to show up at the right time, at the right place and in exactly the right way. So we launched exclusively on social to reach teens where they already spend time, and speak to them through the right voices who could genuinely relate to what they’re going through.

In creating Roo High School as a partnership with content creators, we prioritized Black, Latinx and LGBTQ+ influencers for their ability to relate to this audience authentically. With their help, the content showcased Roo’s personality and brand promise to be a trusted and all-knowing sidekick. The videos were only semi-scripted, giving each participant space to speak as their natural selves.

Roo High School premiered during prom season, a peak cultural moment for teens and sex ed conversations. We capitalized on this by launching our videos with a pre-prom livestream hosted by bisexual, biracial content creator MyLifeAsEva and broadcast to her 9 million YouTube subscribers.

Beyond YouTube, we kept the conversation going with short form content on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Influencers also shared custom posts on their own platforms, bringing Roo to life in a personal way and making it even more relatable and approachable.

By the end of the campaign, our content series views topped 4.75M views. We reached our goal of 500K questions asked (a 290% increase) only 20 days after campaign start. By August, we had reached over 1 million conversations.

Our social ads outperformed national averages and Planned Parenthood’s goals for CPM and CPC, and we achieved 2x the average Snapchat swipe-up rate.

We were supremely efficient with our media budget of $77K, and our videos reached an audience of 91% teenagers aged 13-17, over half of them teens of color. Texas, Florida and Georgia were among the top 10 states reached—a win as we aimed to reach Southern teens.

Our efforts didn’t stop there. The Roo curriculum has been rolled out to three states. Planned Parenthood educators use Roo High School video to show teens what open communication looks like—and why asking questions doesn’t have to be awkward.