“Women & Girls Find your…” campaign

Building on the success of the national “This Girl Can Campaign” from Sport England, Tower Hamlets developed a local digital campaign to inspire women and girls to participate in sports and physical activity, and to promote the range of activities available to them in the borough.

The campaign called “Find your…”  was shaped by local women and girls to empower them to find their place, their community, their friends and their fun to improve their physical and wellbeing. ​The aim was to support support women to be active in ways that work for them, regardless of age, background or ability.

The campaign was launched in August 2023 and ran for 6 weeks as part of the Tower Hamlets Leisure Insourcing project. Digital outcomes and behaviour change were measured to assess impact. 

Improving access to sport and physical activity and reducing the gender activity gap is a strategic priority for the council. However, our local data and intelligence shows that:

• Women (57.7 per cent) are less likely to be active than men (65.5 per cent) (Adults Active Live Survey 2020-21)

• Girls (26.7 per cent) are less likely to be active than boys (37.5 per cent) (CYP Active Live Survey 2020-22)

National data from the England Active Lives survey (2022-23) also shows that girls (26 per cent) are less likely than boys (43 per cent) to have a more positive attitude towards sport and physical activity.

Many factors can prevent women and girls to be as active as they would like to be, including fear of judgement, lack of confidence, lack of time, fear of safety etc.

By sharing a realistic vision of local women and girls enjoying exercise together within their own community, our “Find your…” campaign aimed to address some of those barriers by empowering them with the confidence to exercise on their own terms.

• Coordinated a photoshoot and videos of local women and girls using our leisure centres that reflects the diversity within our community.

• Updated the existing Women & Girls webpage on the council website to include the campaign narrative, opportunities for women and girls and useful signposting links.  

• Ran paid adverts across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Google. 

• Posted content natively on the council’s social media accounts, including case study videos. 

• Shared articles in the residents’ e-newsletter, Headteachers’ Bulletin, staff newsletter and Members’ Bulletin.  

Digital outcomes 

• The webpage gained 8k page views and 487 returning visitors. This demonstrates a 1k per cent increase in page views compared to the same date range in the previous two months (16 Jun – 10 August 2023) before the campaign launched. 

• Across all platforms, the paid adverts gained: 

• 1.5m impressions (total number of times the adverts were shown) 

• 100k reach (number of people to see the adverts – Facebook and Snapchat only) 

• 8k link clicks (number of people that clicked through to the webpage) 

• 10.7k full video views (Snapchat only) 

• Native social media content gained 8.8k impressions, 102 clicks and 81 engagements. 

Behaviour change

• Data provided by Better (Tower Hamlets Leisure Provider at the time) shows that there was a steady increase in female participation from August onwards, following a slight decline in June/July.

 The female membership base rose from 48 per cent in Q1 (Apr-Jun), to 48.6 per cent in Q2 (July-Sept). 

There were no significant changes made to Better’s Women Only programme during this period, nor was there any other increased awareness other than this campaign, which suggest that the trend can be attributed to the awareness campaign. 

• The photos and videos of local women will be used as stock imagery across council campaigns, including leisure insourcing.  

• The campaign will be run again in the future during specific periods (e.g. International Women’s Week etc) or to raise awareness and boost engagement of specific initiatives (e.g. new women and girls free swimming initiative).

Co-developed communication campaigns representing women and girls being active in a positive, realist and inclusive way is likely to have a positive impact on both engagement and physical activity levels. 

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