Non Profit Marketing
Helping girls fight stereotypes – one photo at a time
Background:
Did you know that "Sexy girl" is the number 1 searched term on image banks? This is closely followed by "hot girl". Companies, artists and individuals around the world go to image banks every day to find photography for their ad campaigns, presentations, storyboards and creative expressions. These images perpetuate biases, which perpetuates inequality. And when those images are tagged with words like "hot" and "sexy," these images train algorithms to fuel those biases even further.
Everything Plan International USA does is focused on one simple belief, "when girls lead the way, they can change the world."
Plan strives to achieve this by partnering with adolescent girls, children and young women to overcome oppression and gender inequality. But, gender equality is a noisy issue, so it's hard to cut through and engage supporters. Though brands, businesses and individuals want to take a stance they often don't know where to start, what to do and who to align with. And of course no one wants to get it wrong.
So, we partnered PLAN USA with Unsplash, the internet's source of freely usable visuals, to reframe the way girls are represented in media all around the world.
Because, if we can change the way the world sees girls, we can also change the way girls see themselves.
Process
What We Did
Created the brief
Assembled a group of adolescent girls to create a brief for Unsplash on the types of images and key words they found more representative.
Photographer challenge
Unsplash challenged their global community of photographers to flood their image bank with new photos aligned with the girls' brief.
Reset the algorithm
Unsplash reset their algorithm to associate search terms that are more accurate depictions of how girls want to be perceived.
Selected the winners
The panel of girls voted and selected the winning top 10 photos from the photographer submissions.
Announced the results
The winning photographs were announced online through Unsplash and Plan PR efforts.
Sparked the movement
Girls, parents & supporters were invited to share the winning images and utilize the full bank to help perpetuate the evolution.
Built the community
Supporters and girls joined #WeAreTheGirls by taking the Pledge at WeAreTheGirls.org and signing up for community activations.
