TW: DVSA, PTSD for all following contents.

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Overview

I am concerning the current narrative of Harborview Abuse and Trauma Center (HATC) branding and how it would affect the chance of survival of Asian women sexual assault survivors and PTSD patients.

Therefore, I wish to provide a pro bono full-service for organizing social media and public institution survival message communication campaigns on behalf of HATC, as well as a website branding re-position, that is centering Asian women survivors. 

We are launching a one-month-long social media awareness campaign, in addition to awareness posters and sticky notes that are available in high Asian population traffic areas for 6 months. These contents are designed to help women who are still in an abusive relationship, or people who are concerned about others to identify abusive behavior patterns, along with how to call for help, and how to receive medical and legal support. These posters and sticky notes will appear in the women’s bathrooms of Asian community centers, hospitals, local high schools, college campuses, bars and cafes, and Asian restaurants.

I wish to feature healing instead of trauma, creating visual communication that is culturally resonant for Asian women. Meanwhile, the updated narration will be supported by the declaration of research on Asian identities and cultures, consolidating Asian communities’ testimony, prioritizing women’s safety, and encouraging a sense of compassion throughout.

Who is HATC?

Harborview Abuse and Trauma Center (HATC) have been a well-known, go-to referral for many medical providers when it comes to sexual abuse and trauma survivors. They provide forensic consultation and exams on sexual assault and child abuse cases, as well as evidence-based, PTSD-specialized therapy services for survivors residing in the greater Seattle region. 

HATC vs. Asian Women

Sexual assaults and domestic abuse may occur in any community, regardless of ethnicity and identity, immigration status, culture, and societal class. Shame and embarrassment are the biggest road blockers for sexual assault survivors to reach out to professionals. It is essential for the survivor to access professional support and medical assistance as soon as possible. Early intervention for sexual assault survivors who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could decrease death by suicide by a large percentage. 

However, the mental health crisis stigma has always been a heavy roadblock for the Asian community. Such barricades of reaching out for help could be deadly in the case of survivors with PTSD. The self-blame baggage plus the decades-long cultural stigma within the Asian community on mental health can place Asian women who suffered from PTSD symptoms in a very dangerous situation. Women immigrants, women who are not fluent in English, and Asian women who are still in abusive intimate relationships will have an even harder time receiving the help they need.

Audience Profiling

We are hypothesizing that the Asian women in the greater Seattle region are using Instagram, WeChat, and WhatsApp, we will be promoting our posts on these platforms to raise awareness. We understand that women may not feel comfortable reviewing this information at home, on a shared computer with their partner, or saving these posts on their phone, which is why we also wish to publish survival information in not only public institution buildings but also public spaces’ bathrooms that are popular for Asians to go to.

We will conduct quantitative research to identify our audience’s behaviors and psychographic information. We believe that we could create online contents that are more oriented and efficient toward the survivors when we understand their behaviors better. For instance, for users who are on social media irregularly, we will prepare infographics with short and precise taglines or hotline numbers; for users who are on social media for a longer period of time, we will provide different lengths of videos of survivors sharing their journey of healing. The following is a breakdown of our hypotheses profiling:

• Online behavior

• Our campaign can only safely reach women who have access to and control of their personal social media accounts. Their online behavior can be roughly categorized into two types:

• Type 1: women who are trapped in unsafe environments. Their access to social media is short and fragmented.

• Type 2: women who are in a safe environment and currently experience PTSD symptoms. Their access to social media is closer to that of regular users, if not much longer. It is common for PTSD patients to use social media to distract themselves from their symptoms. 

• Demographics

• We are aware that by limiting our online campaign channel through social media, we are also limiting the age range of our target audience, and women who have access to technologies, smartphones, and stable internet. We are designated to provide our content in multiple Asian languages and have different Asian ethnicity representations in testimony sharing. 

• We are targeting Asian women between the age of 20-40 years old, active around Beacon Hill, University Districts, and International Districts/Chinatown. All content will be provided in English and common Asian languages that are available via the UW Medicine interpreter service.

• Available languages list through UW Medicine:

• Chinese: 普通话 (Mandarin) / 廣東話 (Cantonese)

• Persian: فارسی (Farsi)

• Japanese: 日本語 (Japanese)

• Korean:한국어 (Korean)

• Vietnamese: Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)

• Kazakhs, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmens & Uzbek: Pусский (Russian)

Detractor Audience

Apart from Asian women survivors, there are a few other groups of audience we wish to conduct research on as well. This is an awareness campaign, and we wish to raise awareness not only for the Asian woman herself but also for other audiences who wish to support their Asian fellow survivors but have a narrow understanding of Asian cultural discourse. Our hope is to serve Asian women survivors, but also gather more allies for Asian women.

Another important group of individuals that we must look out for is the abusers. We must be sensitive to our decision, and practice all precautions to prevent our message from pushing the survivors into the worst situation. For example, with the support of statistical testing, we will promote our survival tips on algorithms that follow after beauty influencers, mommy influencers (pregnancy and parental influencers), etc.

Narration Positioning

There is no need to stress the sensitive nature of this topic, which is why it is very essential to understand the balance of narration positioning. The following are a few dilemmas that the messages could fall into:

• Gender antagonism

• We acknowledges that there are male and other genders of sexual violence victims. When we are arguing that sexual violence can happen to anyone, including the Asian community, we are not attempting to ignore male survivors as well. Survivors who identified as women are our focus in this specific campaign, we do not want to be “gender-blind” when it comes to a narrative describing the abuser, it is difficult, or not practical to completely avoid gendering the abuser as male.

• Still, we never wish to encourage gender antagonism. We are recognizing that women are suffering from sexual violence, and most of the abusers are male, but we want to keep the criticism and pressure on the social structure and social norms. This campaign is challenging Asian culture stigma, not gender.

• Proselytism

• When it comes to normalization, and raising awareness of a certain concept or theory, it is possible that judgment and disapproval may come down to the survivor herself. Especially, our campaign is targeting a cultural stigma that was made up by decades if not generations of political and historical components, allies, or the woman herself may be comparing her experience with others. We do not support language including: “It’s not okay to not tell others.” “If I were you, I would do that already.”

• In the region of Seattle, immigrant women may hear some suggestions that have great intentions yet are not helpful for them: “You have no reason to be embarrassed” and “There’s no need to be afraid to tell others.” The difficult reality that our campaign is trying to change is, they are embarrassed, and they have reason to be afraid to speak up. We must validate Asian women’s feelings, validate their struggles and give them space when they are remaining silent.

• We will not force our ideology on women survivors. We recognize that every woman is protecting their safety in her own way. We want to prioritize such protection, even if their actions do not fall under this campaign’s plans and expectations.

Marketing & Promotion Tactics

• Planning for media outreach, which includes

• Collaborate with potential survivors who agree to make testimony via HATC and Project Sarah

• Provide content creation guidelines for short and long script writing, the short, medium, and long forms of testimony filming

• Make partnerships with social media Asian influencers from different platforms that are popular among Asian women in the greater Seattle area

• Provide outreach guideline

• Require to go through educational materials on DVSA and PTSD

• Require to review prepared content by social workers and translators and interpreters before posting

• Multimedia content creation

• Collaborate with Seattle-based Asian journalists and graphic designers. Hire Asian writers and artists who use the listed Asian languages, and provide them with transcreation guidelines.

Theory of change

We wish this campaign to be localized, clear-targeted, and serve the Asian women survivors to help to decrease the self-blame and shame in reaction to traumatic events as well as the stigma in seeking mental health support.

it is not ideal to make expectations on the nature of a DVSA awareness campaign. Please keep in mind that the majority of our target audiences are women currently in danger, and women currently suffering from mental illness symptoms.

Our budget of $15,000, coming from the UW Medicine fund, is to promote all digital content on selected social media channels for 30 days. All printed content would be around the public space for a minimum of 6 months. Within this period of time, we would like to see this campaign gain traffic for our preferred social media channels, but we should not demand that from our audience. It is more important to make sure our audiences are exposed to the content rather than interact with the content. That being said, we would like to place our focus on the action. We are hypothesizing that the ultimate impact of this campaign is to increase Asian women reaching out for help, which does not have to be HATC only. Yet, we theorized that there will be an increase in HATC incoming patients’ data of the Asian women ethnic category.

Awareness-building metrics & Engagement

On each social media channel, we are promoting our digital content for 30 days. We are setting the following goals by the end of the promotion period:

• A total of 100K impressions on each individual channel of the posts

• A significant increase of Asian women survivors and HATC-related hashtags and keywords in platform rankings

• A 100% increase in HATC profile visiting

• A 150% increase in the HATC profile revisit rate

• A 50% increase in HATC profile following

Conversions

Under the impact of both digital and printed content, we are setting the following goals for conversions:

• Program metrics

• A 50% increase in Asian women requesting an initial appointment via the HATC scheduling center

• A 30% increase in Asian women entering HATC PTSD treatment or legal support programs

• A 30% decrease in Asian women dropping out of the HATC PTSD treatment or legal support programs

• HATC website metrics

• A 200% increase in HATC website visiting

• A 50% increase in HATC website returning and unique visits

• A 50% increase in HATC website visitors’ session duration