2014 Bronze Best Writing in Any Medium

How did the campaign make a difference? Tourette Syndrome affects over 300,000 people in the UK, but public awareness is very low. People affected can suffer from extreme symptoms, often misunderstood as antisocial behaviour. In severe cases, this leads to complete social exclusion as they are effectively filtered out by an intolerant society.

The campaign set out to boldly break through the social barriers and stigmas that stop people with Tourette Syndrome from being accepted by society. By designing an innovative, viral message that was impossible to filter out or ignore, Tourettes Action were able to raise awareness and challenge attitudes.

Strategy The campaign sought to break through social barriers that prevent sufferers from leading a normal life, raise awareness and challenge attitudes towards the condition.

An innovative, disruptive email to a small audience of key influencers and bloggers, hand-picked by Tourettes Action Chief Executive, Suzanne Dobson.

The email was easily sharable through social channels to help the campaign go viral. A landing page enabled those who heard about the campaign to start a fresh email chain quickly and easily – with triggered pre-populated Facebook posts and Tweets to amplify the campaign further.

The email showed how people with Tourette Syndrome could make a breakthrough. In a show of defiance against the societal firewall they face every day, the message smashed through barriers to get its message of tolerance across.

Creativity Hitting your contact list with the subject line ‘Forward this ʞɔnɟ to everyone you know’ takes enormous courage. But the email was designed to get a reaction. The use of bad language was calculated and highly relevant to the message. Using swear words made the subject line and email impossible to ignore, whilst the shock factor helped our message to spread virally.

The clever bit was how the communication avoided being blocked or trashed by email filters. Hidden characters, which exist in popular font sets installed on most devices, were used. These characters allowed expletives to be written upside down whilst still remaining perfectly legible. To the human eye, the characters look like rude words upside down, but to a computer they were just symbols that would not be blocked.

Results The objective was a viral email that would reach as many people as possible.

In the first 24 hours, the email was forwarded four times for every one sent. The hashtag #ʞɔnɟthefirewall gained 88,659 estimated impressions. The campaign was promoted by numerous bloggers, reached 80,000 Twitter users and more than doubled the charity’s Facebook engagement rate to 18%.