What is a survivor-informed campaign?

This is Human Trafficking campaign posters, for English and Spanish speaking audiences

When I began working on a state-wide human trafficking awareness campaign, the first thing I learned was that I knew nothing about human trafficking. This isn’t an uncommon place to be. When launching a new endeavor, many of us diligently educate ourselves to the best of our ability. But what if the issue is so intricately complex that the usual research methods only get you so far? How can you know you’re asking the right questions? How do you know you’re engaging the right sources? How do you know what you don’t know?

Having worked on several public health campaigns — water conservation, sex and pregnancy education, and privacy advocacy — I could tell this campaign would be different. Uncovering truths about human trafficking would require a unique and profound approach. It would require connecting with and listening to the people at its core, survivors of human trafficking: lived-experience experts.

Following their lead and listening with humility and empathy led to profound insights into where our team’s knowledge gaps were. Our survivor experts not only educated us about human trafficking but also taught us how to engage with them, how to use their expertise, and what language was appropriate when speaking about survivors and trafficking experiences. They taught me how much I had yet to learn.

Through our relationships and partnerships with lived-experience experts, we created an authentic awareness campaign that accurately communicated not only what human trafficking is but how it impacts people’s lives and why the public needs to be engaged in stopping it.

Proximity — paired with humble listening and an openness to receive unexpected information — can lead to deep insights for any social and purpose-driven project.

The beneficiaries of social campaigns and social enterprises are our ultimate source of truth. Listening to them should be the starting point for any endeavor, from an awareness campaign to a viable social impact business model.

A different kind of campaign

Creative campaigns require the efforts of many. Our small and mighty inner circle was made up of four very hard-working and determined individuals. There was our research arm, a lead strategist and a researcher — and our creative arm, a creative copy director and creative art director (me). Our client was a council of 35 people working in different capacities to end human trafficking. They were an impressive group of judges, social workers, law enforcement officials, district attorneys, victim’s advocates, child advocates, immigrant advocates, and human trafficking survivors (lived-experience experts).

Our campaign aimed to educate the public about human trafficking so that if they were to ever sit on the jury of a human trafficking case, they could identify it and hold traffickers accountable for their crimes. We also wanted the public to call a local hotline if they thought they or someone they knew or had seen was in a human trafficking situation.

Campaign development began with a state-wide survey to determine the baseline of what Colorado residents did and didn’t know about human trafficking. This included subgroups for rural and urban communities as well as demographic breakdowns. We learned the public didn’t know much and what they did know was often inaccurate. 

We started creative development by delving into the formative research outcomes, reading human trafficking cases, watching documentaries, and having in-depth discussions. We reviewed and dissected existing human trafficking awareness campaigns — many showed people in situations that sensationalized trafficking or gave incorrect impressions of it. People were shown in chains and dark corners, leading the public to believe victims were physically restrained — that trafficking happened in the shadows when often human trafficking happens in plain sight, and victims walk among us. We knew we had to push against this and do something different. We wanted our campaign to accurately depict trafficking, in all its forms, with all its complexities.

Our creative strategy was to show how an individual’s vulnerabilities could be exploited. How flattery and hope for opportunities can lure a victim into a trafficking situation. How a situation can turn from something seemingly positive to something very far from it. How threats and violence can coerce a person to stay in an increasingly dangerous situation. And how anyone can fall victim to a trafficker if they are vulnerable — you, your children, family members, friends, and acquaintances.

We created a campaign concept that used words — the experiences of survivors — to build empathy among our audience. The campaign wouldn’t show faces. It often wouldn’t show people at all. We didn’t want to perpetuate any stereotypes about who survivors and traffickers are. We wanted our audience to imagine themselves or someone they knew in a trafficking situation to help them understand what it might feel like. We knew we needed deep insights to make this campaign authentic and truthful. To do this, we turned to survivor and lived-experience expert communities.

Elena’s narrative of sex trafficking, video still from “This is Human Trafficking” awareness campaign.

What we learned about working with survivors

Our team spoke at length about the sensitivities of the topic and how to best approach survivors in a respectful and trauma-informed manner. We didn’t want them to feel like they needed to “tell their stories.” To do that, we developed an interview script to inform where our knowledge was lacking. We were looking for specific information like, what they believed were public misperceptions about human trafficking, why some survivors are prevented from exiting their experiences, and information about how traffickers behave. We knew our experts should be financially compensated. Additionally, a counselor was present during and available after every interview.

We reached out to our communities and identified several lived-experience experts with diverse backgrounds and trafficking experiences who would speak with us. We conducted interviews in April and May of 2020. The pandemic had just reached the U.S., George Floyd had been murdered, and the Black Lives Matter protests were in full force. To say it was a difficult time would be an understatement.

We did our best to create positive experiences despite our collective cultural anxiety. But more than once, our group stumbled. We thought our approach was trauma-informed, but there were boundaries we had been unaware of. We learned how recounting any portion of a trafficking experience can feel exploitative and retraumatizing and that there were genuine trust issues we had not considered.

Through our interviews, we learned exactly how traffickers home in on specific vulnerabilities to exploit their victims. We were able to refine our composite trafficking narratives and tighten the language to make it reflective of how traffickers behave. We heard, over and over, why engaging law enforcement was often not an option. Some individuals had been coerced to commit crimes, some were undocumented, and others were told their families would be killed if they called the police. Because of this, we focused messaging on services, not law enforcement, not to turn survivors away.

Very unexpectedly, we learned that many survivors never even knew what human trafficking was. It wasn’t until they were connected with services or the survivor community that the term “human trafficking” was something they had even heard. We now knew we weren’t just educating the public about human trafficking but also potentially people experiencing trafficking and those who had successfully removed themselves from their trafficking experiences.

Many of the insights we learned we would have never found in our research. Only with the help of our survivor experts were we able to fill in our knowledge gaps and paint a true picture. Their expertise allowed us to avoid stereotypes and better educate the public.

Luke’s narrative of a large-scale sex trafficking ring, “This is Human Trafficking,” awareness campaign in Denver International Airport.

A different kind of reception

Because this campaign was different, it wasn’t the easiest to sell. It was shocking and honest. It wasn’t what people were used to seeing, reading, and hearing. It made them uncomfortable. The state’s international airport wouldn’t even run the campaign at first. Many partners asked us how they were supposed to display our materials. Eventually, through educating them about our process and teaching them that our work was survivor-informed, our partners began to understand and support the campaign. Eventually, the campaign became prolific in the community, with many business owners volunteering to hang campaign collateral in their shop windows and communal spaces.

Listening to and working with survivors was the only way for our campaign to achieve a level of authenticity. It was the only way to learn what we didn’t know. And it was the only way we could do right by survivors. It was important to us that they felt heard, respected, and represented with dignity. We couldn’t have created this campaign any other way, and we couldn’t have done it without them.