100 years ago British women won the right to vote, thanks to the suffragettes – ordinary women who stopped at nothing to get their voices heard.

We knew that the ‘suffragette spirit’ was alive and well in the UK today. Women across the country are standing up to racism, saying no to sexism, calling out homophobia, challenging corruption, helping the vulnerable and more.

The Suffragette Spirit campaign aimed to draw parallels between the women fighting injustice on our own doorsteps – from students to shopkeepers, office workers to OAPs – with the human rights defenders Amnesty campaigns to protect across the globe.

A simple nomination model encouraged the public to look at those in their local community and put them forward for an Amnesty award. It was designed to raise awareness of who can be a human rights defender, acting as a stepping stone towards developing empathy with global activists.

We secured Juliet Stevenson, Shappi Khorsandi, Emma Thompson and Angelica Bell to front the campaign for the four newsgroups.

On 6 February, the exact date that women gained the vote, we placed op-eds by them in every local newspaper in the UK, calling on readers to nominate courageous women in their communities. National media ran a video of Juliet Stevenson to coincide, while further celebrities took to social media to promote #SuffragetteSpirit.

Close liaison with editors resulted in regular nominee profiles to maintain momentum. Then ahead of the 26 February closing date, they ran an op-ed by Amnesty director Kate Allen and a nominee video.

An interactive map, capturing nominees’ photos and stories was hosted on the Amnesty website and embedded on the websites of local newspapers nationwide. On 8 March, International Women’s Day, the map was unveiled alongside an op-ed by Helen Pankhurst, granddaughter of Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst.

Suffragette Spirit is the most successful local media campaign ever carried out across Amnesty International globally. It’s success in the UK has meant Amnesty members across the world are now adapting it for their local markets – the UK team are currently creating a teaching pack for this rollout.

There were 420+ media articles – more than four times the target (100 pieces) which equated to 9.2 million opportunities to see. Most importantly 100% of articles were identified as having ‘very positive’ sentiment.

The repeat coverage in big regional titles thanks to the partnerships we negotiated, followed by the escalation to national media meant deep penetration into our target audience.

Amnesty does not typically appear in women’s media and the new relationships we have built with outlets such as Marie Claire, Glamour and Stylist are of high value for the future.

The target audience outcomes were action on social media (we achieved 2.9 million mentions of #SuffragetteSpirit) and visiting the website to find out more (19,000+ visits to the Suffragette Spirit page – it immediately jumped to become a top 20 page on the Amnesty website out of 100,000+ pages).

Deeper engagement was measured by nominations – a reasonably high bar to entry as it involved filling in detailed forms (700 nominations were made, seven times our target). A stretch target was to warm audiences up for a future approach to become an Amnesty supporter. In actual fact 495 people signed up to become supporters directly from this campaign.