This Girl Can is Sport England’s nationwide campaign to get women and girls moving, regardless of shape, size and ability.
It launched in January 2015.
Problem
This Girl Can was born from a desire to tackle the fact women persistently remain less active than men. ‘This Girl Can’ was designed to identify and overcome the barriers impacting women exercising.
Sport England’s research showed women recognised the benefits of exercise, with 75% saying that they wanted to do more. But something was stopping them.
The project began with nine months of research to deepen understanding of ‘real’ women and the barriers impacting their desire or ability to be physically active. The key insight that emerged was many women were fearful of being judged by others whilst participating in physical activity.
Solution
The campaign:
- focused on overcoming judgement in three areas: appearance, ability and priorities.
- used ‘street casting’ of women exercising, emotive language and selected channels to creating meaningful engagement and resonate with the target audience.
- aimed to erase the previous conceptions of what a women who exercised must be and aimed to attract women of all abilities, shapes and sizes, and overcome their reservations about exercising.
- Understanding that behaviour change is not always immediate and often requires a transitioning process. Sports England created a behaviour change model based to assist the development of the campaign. The model features five key stages in changing behaviour that Sport England’s programmes include. The model transitions from pre-contemplation through to maintenance.
Impact
In one year, the ‘This Girl Can’ began altering perception of physical activity with its content viewed 37 million times on Facebook and YouTube, tweeted about 660,000 times and interacted with 540,000 across the campaign’s social media community. The biggest impact of the campaign was the ‘2.8 million 14 - 40-year-old women say they have done some or more activity as a result of [this] campaign’. The impact of the campaign was monumental, and it has been praised for its pioneering ability to deliver real participation in physical activity.
The campaign, now close to four years old and in its third phase, ‘Fit Got Real’, has received international appraise and has inspired over 3 million women in the UK to be more active since launching in 2015.
Learn more: This Girl Can | Sport England