By Astrid Hoekstra, Ymke Knaap & Anouk van der Schoot.
Our Value Creator Journey started in September with a lot of uncertainty and an initial goal to improve sex education within schools in the Netherlands. The group felt from experience that it could use a lot of improvement, and as it turned out, so did a lot of the young people in the Netherlands. After a lot of research, we were able to narrow down certain subjects that needed more awareness among our society; LGBTQI, consent, sexual power dynamics, pleasure, condom use, etc. After narrowing the topics down, we quickly realized that we focused on sexuality education rather than sex education.
To realize our goal of bringing more awareness and knowledge to our topics. We reached out to several stakeholders and networks with expertise on these topics. We talked with people from Rutgers, the GGD, Sense, and Kikid. Furthermore, we spoke to students and teachers to get their views on sexuality education in the Netherlands. By talking to these different organisations and people, we were able to narrow down the important topics and learn the best way to spread the knowledge.
Our initial idea was to start a campaign named “The Talk.” The campaign would consist of posters about the different topics and to hang them in schools, funny videos that spread awareness, and social media platforms to post these posters and videos.
But while we came up with creative ideas to spread that awareness, Covid-19 was causing the country to lock down; schools were closing. We weren’t able to hang posters in schools and make the videos as it required more people than allowed to get together. So we decided to focus on social media, which is extra booming in the lockdown since many young people are bored. We made an Instagram and Twitter account to post appealing messaging spreading correct information.
Furthermore, we created a social marketing plan. This plan tells our Value Creator Journey in detail. It talks about our roadblocks due to Covid-19, our solutions, and maybe most importantly: future possibilities. This way, the “The Talk'' can be taken over by one of our networks or another value creator team. There is still so much to discuss regarding sex and sexuality education, and we didn’t have nearly enough time to do so. The topics discussed have a very sensitive nature; therefore, it is essential that it is done with discreteness and no mistakes.