Over to you, Anna. Thank you so much. I'm Anna Rivadze. I'm from the organization Faucet and also Data Visibility. Today, I'll talk about how we designed and ran one of the Georgia's largest online pro democracy campaign focused on Gen Z and what we learned about reaching audiences in the practice. This was our final campaign results, in a 4,000,000 population country by the end of the campaign. After 145 videos, with 17 content creators, we've had around 9,000,000 views, half a million of likes, and I will explore other, key metrics shown below, in the later on the presentation. Everything actually started, two years ago when we had the the first, Russian law introduced, in our country, and the Gen z, took to the streets and, protested it. And, their activism really helped to stop the first implementation. Many of them, hadn't even probably voted yet, but, their pro democracy and pro western values were clear. And this showed us that, if we wanted to defend democracy, we need to speak with this generation and not at them. So, but, actually, as many of you know, civil society often struggles here. Our language is too complex, so too institutional, and doesn't connect with the young generation, and that's why we've decided to experiment with the campaign using influencers as, the trusted messengers. So, we kicked off, with the preparation phase, for the campaign, which lasted around one year. The preparation actually started, lasted, for a longer time, since the campaign itself. Campaign lasted approximately three months. And for a whole campaign, the idea was that everything we did, in the campaign should have, been based on, research, and we wanted to, come up from the preferences, of our target audience. And the idea also was that we wanted to educate influencers around elections and have the long term engagement even beyond the elections. And another crucial component was, to monitor the campaign in life itself of, not just, finishing it finishing it, wrapping up, and looking at the metrics and then writing reports like we usually do in the projects, and we wanted to have outcomes, on it, so we could fail during the campaign and we could, learn from it. And because it was a really, really experimental campaign, like, all campaigns are especially with the influencers. So, why influencers? Because we now realized that, we wanted to talk to our target audience with the most trustworthy messengers for the young generation. We did a research and consultancy several months and realized that, there were at least, two options and strategies, while recruitment of the influencers. First option usually, is to work with those influencers who already talk about politics, activism, election, disinformation, or are partnered, with those organizations who already talk about these issues. In the this option, the good thing is that you empower those, people, who also are engaged at the same cost as you, but, you also kind of keeping, keep reaching the, same audience, that is already reached. In the second option, you actually break your bubble, break your circle, and it does sound, great, but it it is kind of difficult to reach a new audience. It is difficult for you to work with a skincare influencer who has never put on a video on politics or elections and suddenly they start talking about it. It's weird for the creator. It's weird for their audience, and, it's not very, natural for them. But if this, option is done right, it could be, most impactful, way to do this. We also realized that there are three strategies in in terms of, curating the campaign. Our first option is to have so called, script based campaign where, basically, you define what the influencer will talk about. You will write, scripts and, the influencer will read it in their videos. But, this kind of falls into the category where you speak with your own language to your to the audience. You just have different messengers to do this, and it's not very effective to reach new audiences. The second option, e, that is done worldwide is to give influencers the total creative freedom, and you will achieve the best results here because you will have the most organic content. But, when the campaign is done by civil society and, we usually have donors, we usually have some kind of restrictions, the total freedom, might have some kind of, safety issues as well. And the third option is a bit more balanced option where you give creators a total creative freedom, but also intervene on time to time by giving them tips, by giving them mentorship, consultancy. And, this is the best option if you wanna have, like, more organic, content but also work in some kind of frames. Also, I have here the market, that you can collaborate with. It can be a micro influencer, mid mid size influencer, and also, like, huge influencer. When content creator has, maybe only 10 k followers, it doesn't necessarily mean that, they will not reach a certain audience. They could potentially have, like, some kind of niche audiences, and you still can reach, your target goals. First, of course, we wanted to learn, about our audience. It's not like we woke up one day and, had some money from the donors and wanted to make content videos, and do the campaigns. Of course, first, we need to learn how how about our target audience. We, wanted to we, did the desk research where we identified the platforms, that young voters use. It was mostly TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and also we did the focus groups where we identified, with the Gen z where we, asked the if an influencer talked about elections, would you listen? What what kind of information would you wanted to hear from them? And, after this, we identified 65, possible, influencers. And from those, we chose 17 who not only had their audiences, but also shared the the same values, so that collaboration would be smooth. We also partnered with election experts, experts, because while Forsyth, our organization is strong in storytelling, data visualizations, we're not election experts, specialists, and, they actually helped us to develop key strategic messages such as, why every vote matters, how to register to vote, why, the vote bribery, are harmful, and, what to do if your rights are violated on the election day and etcetera etcetera. We also, divided the campaign phases. The first was test, campaign. It lasted around one month, and we tried the different formats, different tones, different messaging. And many videos failed during this, process, but it taught us what worked, and we did, really learned our lessons. Second, was informative phase, which lasted six weeks, and influencers explained more about, information about elections and how voting worked, and all the thematic, things. And the third phase was, actions trend phase, the final phase that lasted around ten days. And, we pushed more trends and, challenges, the sounds, memes, and, really wanted to create the urgency and the formal the fear of missing out that other people would, join and make more videos around elections and spread more information. We also set, KPIs and this really helped us to then identify all the people that we actually reached. First, we metric that we aimed, was, engagement rate. It is a, portion of likes, comments, shares, and saves on the, on the general views of the video. So a lot of times, when we hear about the campaigns, people say that, we've reached 1,000,000 people. Reaches are not very reliable source of measuring the campaign because, if I have a video on my news feed, it already counts as a reach. But did I watch it? But did, did I clicked on it? Did I like it? Did I interfere with it? That is what, engagement rate actually shows. So, usually, marketing agencies, they aim for more than 4% engagement rate, but in the end of our campaign, we had 8% engagement rate, which was a big success for us because it was democracy oriented, campaign and not a marketing campaign. Of course, we can never reach 100 of our target audience. Not all of them use Instagram, TikTok. Not all of them are fall following our creators, but if you can reach 40% or 50% of your target audience, then there is, this thing called word-of-mouth, and you can spread information that way. Another metric that we used is, user generated content. So, let's say you see a video, you will like it. That's great. You will comment it on it. That's also huge engagement. But if your video inspires other person to make, same kind of video or with their own spin, it it is user generated content, and it it is a huge, impact that you can do in such kind of campaigns. So I there were, like, a lot of questions in terms of how to do these trends and how to, have your videos go viral. And our approach was to just gather creators in the same room and, give influencers the total freedom. We should try, to think less of us, and we should give space to the creators who are actually experts in this area and who basically earn money in and their incomes in breaking algorithms. So that was our approach, and in, we basically just facilitated the process and just helped them during this process. I will show you some kind of examples of what kind of, videos so you can create. This is mainly, in TikTok. You can just, create a game in the app, and, some people will use it. In this case, we have a game about elections. It's in Georgian here, but, a lot of people used it, and it went viral because our creators at first started in using it. You can also make a quiz or ranking, and here is, like, what kind of person you are while going in the elections. It's not a proper translation, but it was, like, kind of this thing that they were ranking and making videos and it really reached, a lot of people. You can also create your own sound or your own creator can make a sound and plus action. In this case, we had, get ready with me to go, vote or to go in elections. So this really also went viral. But in some cases, you can not count all the user generated content that is created in the, Internet because TikTok is so huge that some of, some of the people can can not use your sound but still do your trends. So it kind of sometimes gets out of hand at it really reaches, huge amount of people. So I already mentioned that it is very important to monitor your campaign in life so you can make mistakes during the campaign. We, collected the data, and we retrieved the analytics from the content creators after, two weeks. Well, they published the videos, and it really helped us to compare numbers, analyze the sentiments in the comments, analyze, answer some kind of questions, and to be prepared in the future videos. So it's also best to monitor everything, in life. These are all the metrics and all the data that, we collected from the influencers. And then just based on these, we analyzed everything, and I will just know don't go very deep into these numbers. But I think this is the most crucial and important part when you do such kind of campaigns of what kind of lessons you've learned during this process. And we've learned that it is very, good to do less, micromanaging and give more independence to the creators, and to the influencers because they know their, job the best. And also it is very, important to, have more risk assessments, because it can really influencers can receive a lot of hate speech, reports, hate comments, and it is really important for you to, check this in a daily basis. And if your resources are limited, it's also always better to, to recruit influencers who do not talk about your issues so you can reach the new audiences. And it is very important to experiment in this kind of cases because, experimenting will lead you where you wanna be, so you will make more and more videos. And, lastly, pro democracy projects reach, their audiences not by just shouting louder, but just, speaking in the right voice and through the right messengers and the platforms, that, people are actually use. And, our expertise shows that, if you just give, young people the tools, and they will not just listen, they will just create and spread, their own messaging.

So I am a speaker. There's a temptation to speak too much. So I'm going to use more visual, impressions of that work that we do. I'm going to start with this TikTok video. And this is me in the flesh in the video if you'll be watching the video. In parliament. Why do MPs summon ministers and heads of institutions like Uganda Airlines to parliament? Where do they even get that power? Think now that when you translate that analogy, the referee in this specific case is the Auditor General who audits every financial report of government every year and submits that report to parliament. Okay, that's January, December thereabout. Think of the coach. The coach in this case is the parliament. The parliament is the one that calls in every ministry, every sub department, and calls them to answer questions about their financial statements every year. Just like a coach would call every other player after every match and ask them what went wrong in the match or what went right. Then there are the players who are the government agencies here. The very nature of democracy is that no one has absolute power, anyone can be questioned. So like we said, parliament constitutionally has the power of requesting everyone who received taxpayers money to account for that money every year. And it has been tear and a curve time and agencies have been rolling every other day as we are going to be. All right. So that was, that was our TikTok account. I'm going to proceed to the next, and I'll make commentary at once. So what you can see on our screen is a podcast episode on YouTube. That's, marriage bill 2024, whether it's a triumph for women or a tool for oppression. So as you can see, it's, it's a podcast which has about 53 episodes right now. It's called Policy Digest on YouTube. I think this is the part where I, like, sort of ask you to be a subscriber. But as you can see, we've, covered work around the colonizing philanthropy, the marriage bill, post legislative scrutiny around artificial intelligence, around political parties, about, Saragas said there's a bill in parliament about, the human assisted productive technology, about climate change, about so many topics as you can see. If you go there during the the the the heat of the Uganda parliament exhibition, we did feature, activists and, tour de noches series to support the activist community in doing the kind of work that, they were doing. That's that's, that that's on our YouTube channel. Now let let me just get to, x, which is Twitter. So as you can see on the screen, we we have a Twitter account which, covers parliament proceedings on a daily basis. So as parliament happens, we cover it. Like, yesterday, when when when embassies had gone to parliament, to to meet the speakers, we are covering it as you can see here. You can see this is the deputy speaker of parliament. So I'm going to start by saying my name is Joseph, Joseph Tahinuka. I am a programs officer at the Center for Policy Analysis, and, I'll be telling you about how we are reaching, the majority of Ugandan people who are the Gen z's. Okay. So Uganda is relatively a very young country. 73.2% of citizens in Uganda are below the age of 18. Significantly, they are the ones who have the most proximate interest in using digital technology. What that means is that we have to reach them, because if we don't reach them, we would be speaking to ourselves. So I will be highlighting what our audience is. So Sepe does not, say see the ordinary person who is on social media as just the audience. We have subcategorized the audience into various partners. The first is civil society itself. We see ourselves as a source of quality information that can be supplied to Uganda civil society to then enable them to hold a government to account. So we, through our newsletter on a regular basis, reach out to different civil society players about different issues to do with human rights, climate change, governance, such that with that information, they can be able to get to these specific people. So beyond the website, we really get the information now we've centralized in one location and send it via newsletter platform. We've also established a lot of horizontal linkages, informal but very effective, where civil society organizations that are at the front lines of holding the government to account are able to reach out to us, and we provide them with enough information. I'll give you an example. Recently, we had your a Ghana Parliament Exhibition that was led by another activist organization, which is called Agora. We have been over, like, three years supplying them very high quality information about information which is coming from parliament. The idea is that we see ourselves as to provide very important information which can enable quality accountability processes to proceed. The second is the media, and this is this is quite quite important. We see the media as a fundamental functional tool that enables us to, supply information, and I'm going to just get right into that just in a moment. So we have what we call the it's just over here. The parliament watch, media accountability network. So we have over 74, members within this network. These are, news editors in local radio stations upcountry. These are journalists themselves who write daily. These are people who themselves have an audience. What we do is to ensure that we share with them information as it comes in real time. Here is the deal. The deal is that in radio stations, they press sound bites, but they also refer to what is happening. And this is on a regular basis. And Uganda as a con as a nation has a unique dynamic. According to a recent report, which was done by Taweza, they did highlight, and this was quite quite important, they did highlight that 56% of Ugandans still rely on radio as a primary source of information. We kill our bubble. We float it out and reach out to those specific grassroots by establishing those horizontal linkages. Of course, it would have been our honor to reach directly, but we know that the work of, enhancing democracy requires partnership, and that partnership requires that you know your place and then you see how to provide that specific, perspective. And and that's, like, very, very important, the media. So we harness that as a very, very important aspect of the work that we do. Okay. Let's now get to the democratic majority. Who are the Gen z's? The Gen z's. So the Gen z's are on social media. Now there are very key characteristics of this user group that we have understood carefully. First of all, their attention span is so limited. And as a result, we used to call to do traditional journalism. As a and we had to evolve, around two years back with support from our partners. That's a national endowment for democracy, and and put up a multimedia studio. And what this multimedia studio does is that we we develop content, and this content is very, very and as you can see here on the screen. Right? This this this content that we developed, like the one I I did, start with, reaches them where they are. And we've been doing analytics, and we have to be frank. We have learned quite a lot in terms of how they could do analytics. We see some of these videos have two hundred and forty hours of watch hours on aggregate with twenty second to thirty second someone watching twenty seconds to thirty seconds, like, 11% ratio of the video. So we think that because young people are on social media, then we should find them there, and that's what pretty much we've been doing. So because of our unique case scenario, and I want to really emphasize this, TikTok in Uganda is a big thing. Right? So you you can't keep on your website. Otherwise, you'll keep uploading information there. You'll be as good as, our friends from the UN. Right? They have a lot of reports, but no one ever reads them. Right? So what we do is that if a bill has happened with a proof of parliament, we break it down. And then we get the video running on social media, and we ensure that that video travels as far as it can. We do this for committee reports in parliament. We do this, for, we we we do this for for for bills themselves, for statements, for issues. When, let's say, certain agencies appear in parliament, we run a poll on our social media platforms to ensure that citizens can send in their comments, which we then transmit to our contacts. Because, like I did say, we have, we have quite quite, a a number of civic technology websites, but people don't reach them. So sometimes even when you have let's say, we have an entire platform, which, which just in a second, I'll show you. It it has pretty much every member of parliament. It's I wouldn't say it's more or less, but let's say it's it's it's quite it's a parliament performance, tracker parliament a parliament performance tracker. As you can see, you can easily go to, let's say, one district just here and you just go and see your MP. But we know people rarely come here. So what we see, we see we see websites like an ocean. You know, an ocean, it has very many rivers that feed into it. So when we make posts elsewhere, they link back to, like, these specifics. So we have this information. We call M Visa and say, there's this issue which has come up on our web on our social media platforms. Are you able to sort of get into that? As you can see, we have, this website, which has a permanent performance tracker. It has finance trackers, which are able to relay the entire budget and provide meaningful insights. But we know that people rarely visit these things. So what we do, we said, okay. We're going to find you where you are. We will not wait for you. We will ensure that wherever you are, we find you there. So this is something we've decided to do deliberately to ensure that, we we do exactly that, as you can see. So the information that we have centrally on websites, even when we try to make it as accessible as possible, we've learned a critical lesson, which is that we must reach people where they are at, and that's a very, very crucial insight, that we must reach them where they are at, and that is a crucial lesson that we've come to learn. And this is this is quite quite important because, otherwise, you you will become like a traditional, parliament went to organization, which pretty much speaks to itself and writes very shiny reports, but which if you were to look beneath, there's, like, very, very, very little impact. So we've, been very, very deliberate at ensuring that whatever we have with our very beautiful trackers, we have the biggest tracker, we have loans trackers, we have we have really a lot of trackers. But we know that the current generation at the moment is on TikTok, and, they visit websites, but not so much. For example, the recent data we received realized that over 9,000,000 people visit TikTok. That's 31% of the traffic volume in Uganda. 31% also visit WhatsApp. So we've addressed towards TikTok, WhatsApp, to ensure that, we we don't speak to ourselves. So in terms of how our other efforts feed into all these specific aspects, I think I've been very, very clear. We ensure that whatever is on our website is digitized into video content using artificial intelligence, using content creators to ensure that we have the impact of people getting to the kind of work that we are doing. So in action, in terms of the means with which we use, we ensure that we reach them where they are. And the websites that we have are as are a depository. They act as a press of record for those who, maybe respond to our click baits and get to our websites. They are able to get to our websites, and our numbers are good. Our numbers are good in regards to how many people sort of visit, websites. But we know for a fact that, people, even when you have a link there, there's so much traffic on the Internet. You're competing with people who are dancing. You're competing with people who are doing other things. The Super Rugby Genesys are quite interested in. So what we do is to ensure that this information that we receive reaches them directly. And, just, if we are to just close in as you can see, this is these are our Facebook analytics, just, last month. And and, this is Twitter. Right? 2,700,000 impressions, clicks, for the 5,000, unique visitors at 18,000. These are our digital townhose, the separate convos, the studio that we leverage as you can see on the screen. So we've we've decided to be very, very deliberate about transforming the way we reach young people, and and that is, quite quite important in the brand, scheme of things. As I end So the the the context of us operating in in in in a nascent democracy, that that's Uganda, which is also is, sort of turning to be a a bit, dictatorial to the extent that the democratic freedoms have been shrinking, provides a real platform for, for for digital and civic engagement because already people cannot organize physically because roles like the public order management bill have been put in place, which don't allow people to meet physically. So we've decided to take all that civic engagements that would ordinarily take place physically to the digital world, and we are going to continue this story. And we are quite, grateful to, to to this very event for allowing us to share our experience.