In South Africa, guns are a play a significant role in violence against women and 75% of cases in which a woman is shot and killed involve a legal gun. Most of these murders are committed by an intimate partner at home.

Gun Free South Africa (GFSA), a non-profit organisation helping to make South Africa safer by reducing gun violence, needed to inform women of this risk and get them to remove any guns from their home.

“If your partner owns a gun, you could be the next target”. We created a hard-hitting print and poster campaign that expresses how vulnerable having a gun in your home makes you by visually turning women into shooting targets.

The striking visual coupled with the compelling call-to-action drove women to immediately seek help with removing guns from their home.

Implementation:

The poster was designed and produced by Y&R to be distributed to 4000 Police stations across South Africa through the assistance of multiple NGO Partners of Gunfree SA.

Timeline:

The campaign went live 01 February 2016 and ended after women’s day 08 March 2016.

Placements:

• 4000 police stations across SA – (Poster)

• Press conversion of Poster

• Social Media posts – FB / Twitter

Scale:

#Femicide was a national country wide campaign.

A media statement was issued on Thursday 11, which went out to 15,000 people.  The media’s response was amazing and included interviews on eTV, SABC and ANN7, as well as various radio interviews; and various partners in the NGO sector picked up on and supported the campaign.

We’ve also had 4000 copies of the poster printed and distributed to police stations around the country via partner networks.

Other actions to promote the campaign included:

• Social media post

• Opinion pieces

• Media placements to include the poster as a print execution in press.(Total readership of 4,657,200)