The Lebanese judiciary system never incorporated any kind of texts punishing domestic violence. After years of lobbying, a law against domestic violence drafted by the NGO Kafa was finally going to be proposed for voting in Parliament.

Kafa came to us to help them put pressure on Members of Parliament. Women representing 52% of the voting force, we decided to threaten the MPs with the one weapon that could make a difference: OUR VOTES.

We invited people to color their thumbs in red (instead of the voting “blue”) and threaten overtly: Vote for us, We’ll vote for you.

We launched our PR campaign by a call for action that spread like wildfire. People from all walks of life joined our movement resulting in an unprecedented wave of participation that led to the passing of the law.

We asked Kafa activists, major influencers and key TV anchors to color their thumbs in red, post them online or show their Red Thumbs on TV shows. We also encouraged them to couple their posts with threatening statements against politicians, asking simply for the tradeoff: I will vote for you only if you vote for me.

Using the media, we reached out to every Lebanese in the country and worldwide. This also helped us put pressure on all political groups and MPs. All media channels collaborated with us by endorsing our campaign symbol, the red thumb; newspapers, TV and magazines.

The campaign was a huge success as we managed to achieve our overall objective.

1- We were able to create phenomenal awareness and engagement in a very short period of time:

• More than 22 million Twitter impressions in the first 2 weeks from 51 countries

• More than 20,000 physical and digital red thumbs gathered

• A 700% increase in online conversations about domestic violence

• A 350% increase in comments on Kafa’s Facebook page

• A 23% increase in followers on Kafa’s Twitter page[5]

• 1.7 million USD in earned media

• 2 million people exposed to the campaign from the TV news coverage only in a country of 4 million

2- On April 1st 2014, while our red thumbs were waiting outside the parliament, the law passed.