We came up against eight commercial campaigns with generous budgets when we participated in the Rockit Awards, covering nine Eastern European and CIS countries. And … we made it!

Our initial goal was limited to broadcasting the TV series ‘Above the sky’, produced by UNDP in Belarus and featuring the drama of a young singer living with HIV. We wanted to raise awareness about HIV among youth in Moldova, prevent new HIV infections and combat prejudices about people living with HIV. Moldova is seeing one of the fastest growing HIV epidemics in Europe, and people living with HIV here are among the least accepted in society. It was not difficult to convince the management of public TV company Moldova 1 to air the TV series, of course adding subtitles in local language. 

The eight episodes of the series were broadcast a first time from Monday to Thursday during two weeks in November-December 2015, in prime time, after the main news bulletin. To raise attention on the TV series, we also used the momentum of UN’s 70^th anniversary and World AIDS Day, on 1 December. We spread the word via Facebook, Odnoklassniki (the most popular social media network in Moldova outside the capital Chisinau) and Google display. We created a bi-lingual landing page, to direct the banners to the trailer of the movie and provide all relevant details and the schedule.

Colleagues from the Moldovan NGO Positive Initiative, the League of People Living with HIV, Ombudsperson Office, Equality Council and three UN Agencies – OHCHR, UNAIDS and UNODC – joined the campaign*.

The on-line outreach results were impressive for Moldova - and the best we ever reached at UNDP Moldova: more than 37,000 trailer views in the 3 days after the campaign’s launch.  On Odnoklassniki, more than 800,000 impressions; and more than 2 million views on Google display. However, the number of viewers on Moldova 1 was just slightly higher than the average at primetime, from 2.69% SHR** to 2.72 % SHR. Therefore we strived for more!

The second wave of our campaign culminated on 16-17 January 2016, and that’s where we gained our award – learning from the previous phase:

1. We redesigned the banners and other online visual materials in a more attractive way, reflecting a drama, several persons, love and action.
2. We used the opportunity of the winter holiday period and the TV’s management openness to air the TV series during one weekend, with four episodes per day, increasing the chances our target audience will watch the whole series.
3. We targeted specific groups, most vulnerable to being infected with HIV: men having sex with men, commercial sex workers and injecting drug users. We took our time to get to know better their media habits and posted our online ads on the specific platforms they mostly use, such as dating and announcements portals. Quite unusual for a UNDP campaign, and at the same time extremely efficient and to the point. At the same time we activated our partners in relevant networks and NGOs, such as Positive Initiative, League of People Living with HIV, GENDERDOC-M, and asked them to help spread the word about the movie
4. We included new features, such as an interactive contest with prizes. People were invited to answer all questions and win selfie sticks, smart puzzles, creative chess tables, magazines, and other special UNDP prizes.
5. We participated in a popular morning show at Moldova 1 to promote the series and the contest.

Better targeting and interaction made the success of the second wave. Still, it was not only about digital. The decision to broadcast the whole series in one weekend was the lucky one. But 14,000 persons visited our landing page, 300 of them participated in the contest. We reached more than 2 million impressions (unique users seeing the banner) on Odnoklassniki, 158,000 on Facebook, 100,000 on www.999.md (announcement platform, dating section) and 500,000 on my.mail.ru.

And at this point … the Moldova 1 rating reached 7.62% SHR – almost three times as much as at first screening! Moreover, we had 600 viewers on Youtube; and this was an unexpected result since we had not done any promotion of this channel.

We are very proud to have been awarded with the RockIT Award for best use of social media. More than that, we are happy if this initiative helped raise awareness and increase acceptance towards people living with HIV. Still, we are aware of some challenges we met, and we plan to work more to fight them implementing even more creative ideas within the third wave of the campaign. The story has not ended yet.

* The campaign was organized within the Project «Supporting National Human Rights Institutions as per International Treaty Bodies and Universal Periodic Review Recommendations», which is funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and implemented in the Republic of Moldova by the United Nations Development Programme in Moldova (UNDP) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in cooperation with the Ombudsperson Office and the Equality Council.

** SHR = The share points measure the percentage of all private TVs in use at a given time watching a particular program.