Two years of being in the know

Be in the KNOW was launched at the end of March 2022. In just over two years, the sex and sexual health brand has reached millions of individual advice seekers, community educators and frontline health practitioners across sub-Saharan Africa with fresh, sex-positive content that is building knowledge and confidence, and supporting informed choices.

Throughout its second year the brand reached 13 million people and continued to push ahead in key areas including supporting self-care, giving voice and reflecting real lives, prioritising pleasure-inclusive sexual health, countering misinformation, and investing in an approach of iterative learning and improvement.

During the year we published a range of successful, action-oriented content that built knowledge, confidence and skills, and supported self-care. This included new co-created content to help young people prepare to talk to their doctor about HIV or STI testing, reaching over 5 million people, with over a million post engagements and 1,600 shares. In our regular user surveys, 91% of respondents said they had learned something new, 89% said they more likely to take an action, and 70% said their attitudes had changed as a result of interaction with our content.

We directly engaged with users in Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe through focus group discussions, user experience (UX) sessions, and WhatsApp groups – as well engaging with expert focal points and constantly listening to our users’ comments and discussions across the brand’s channels. As a result, a range of new content including our ‘First hand’ blog and video series went live, amplifying community voices and reflecting real lives. We also started developing an exciting new network of sexual health social media champions, developing and supporting new local voices through social media training and mentoring in Zimbabwe.

As the first organisation to endorse the Pleasure Principles, sex-positive and pleasure-inclusive content has always been a priority for Be in the KNOW. Over the year we undertook ‘pleasure reviews’ of our existing website and social media content, as well as developing new content such as our sexual health basics video series. Showing the exciting, steamy, and sometimes silly, realities of sex, these taboo-busting videos reached over 2.16 million people during launch campaigns, gaining 1 million engagements across social, and topping over 130,670 engaged video views.

We also developed a range of new content to counter myths and misinformation, all drawing on what we were hearing through our user engagement and the real experiences of our audience. Content on masturbation, foreplay, lube, stigma and self-stigma has helped young people to feel informed and better able to make their own choices. As one user in Nigeria put it, “Now I can jerk off and not feel like a terrible person, thanks for this information!”

Particularly importantly, we continued to learn and improve. New grant funding enabled us to learn more about the gaps between the behavioural aims of Be in the KNOW’s website and social media content and the actual actions of users. We then used data analysis, A/B testing and UX work to inform improvements across the website and social – ultimately increasing the effectiveness of the site to support informed choice and action. (See more about our theoretical approach to this work here.)

The result of all this work in the second year of Be in the KNOW has been the brand engaging more people than ever. Our engagement on social media doubled from 2 million engagements in year one to 4 million in year two. Nearly 73% of website sessions were engaged (up from 65% in year one), 87.7% of users found the site useful (up slightly from 87%), and 89% were more likely to take an action (up from 81% a year earlier).

We’re proud of the growing engagement of Be in the KNOW’s users and the impact it’s having on their knowledge, confidence and behavioural intention. One user from Zambia wrote to say Be in the KNOW “has given me much courage to get treated before it’s too late”, while another user from Kenya let us know it had “encouraged me for a [HIV] test and not be afraid”. This increased confidence is critical to improving quality of life, resilience, self-efficacy, and wider self-care for young people across sub-Saharan Africa.

Photo credit: Gulshan Khan/Avert/Ikusasa Lethu. Photos are used for illustrative purposes. They do not imply health status or behaviour.