“How can developed countries support global health and well-being and contribute to ending poverty?” – this is the question posed at the beginning of a new video developed by Countdown 2030 Europe partner the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA), entitled Joining the Dots – How Investment in Family Planning Safeguards Women’s Human Rights.
To answer this question, the video highlights how investment in family planning information, supplies and services for women and girls allows them to better plans their lives and realise their full potential. When women and girls can decide freely the number and spacing of their children, if any, they are more likely to finish education, participate in paid employment and they have better health outcomes. As a result, they benefit, their families benefit, and their communities benefit.
The overall aim of the project was to raise public awareness in Ireland about the importance of investing in family planning, in order to ensure that at least 120 million additional women and girls can access contraception by 2020. The video drew attention to the global contraception funding gap, emphasising that this gap must be closed in order to meet the reproductive health needs and rights of millions of women in developing countries.
The IFPA carried out a social media campaign to promote Joining the Dots, tweeting key messages from the video and using relevant hashtags such as #Stand4FP and #FP2020 to broaden the reach of our posts (screenshot below). In advance of the video’s release, teaser posts were sent out across the IFPA’s social media channels (Facebook, Twitter) using stills from the video.
To accompany this social media campaign, the IFPA commissioned a digital ad to run on the website of the Irish Times, a leading broadsheet newspaper. Subsequently, the digital ad ran for two weeks on the website of the Irish Medical Times, a weekly newspaper for doctors in Ireland.
