Customer Stories
Insta vs. reality: how South Wales Police used genuine storytelling to tackle coercive control
This Valentine’s Day, South Wales Police adopted a more creative approach, allowing them to be proactive rather than reactive.
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On Valentine’s Day, public sector social media is usually a wash of stock images of roses, hearts and chocolates, along with generic safety campaign advice which is typically rolled out year after year. This year, South Wales Police (SWP) broke the mould with an innovative campaign that didn’t look like your typical police advert. Instead, it took the form of an authentic Instagram story portraying a coercive relationship. And that is exactly why it was so impactful.
Coercive control isn’t just a one-off incident; it’s an evolving pattern of behaviour. It’s also a subject matter that has been getting a lot of airtime and scrutiny recently across traditional media outlets. By identifying this as a campaign focus, the team at SWP sought to be more proactive rather than reactive in both highlighting and tackling this issue.
By sharing the early warning signs of coercive control, such as isolation, financial control, and monitoring, the team looked to arm their audience with the knowledge and information to identify risks before they escalate.
To address this issue, the campaign needed to cut through the noise of other Valentine’s-related content on Instagram and capture the attention of the Force’s target audience.
The difficulty of this campaign was to also portray coercive control as gender neutral. Stepping away from relying solely on images of flowers, which tend to be more targeted towards females, and including a mixture of drinks, food, sports and holidays to keep it more general.
The solution
The genius of the campaign, led by Isobel Daniels, Campaigns Officer at SWP, lay in its genuine authenticity. To ensure the content felt ‘real’, Isobel bypassed traditional design tools, choosing instead to use her own photos from nights out, holidays and sports events, to provide that native aesthetic.
Using the well-known trend ‘Insta vs Reality’ to highlight the often hidden nature of coercive control, Isobel was able to emphasise the different forms this kind of crime can take. The team behind the campaign were also conscious to include real-life examples where this can happen to both women and men, ensuring the message landed with a wider audience. As Isobel explains:
“I really didn’t want it to look edited, I wanted it to look realistic. I think this helped massively as people genuinely thought we had posted by mistake… it generated so much engagement, it was overwhelming to see such positivity.”
The results
The posts generated so much engagement and positivity towards the Force’s approach to the subject matter. The campaign wasn’t just a creative success; the Orlo Campaign Report provided the data to back it up and help inform future campaign planning. Playing out on both Instagram and Facebook channels.
- Huge reach: The campaign achieved a total reach of 1.6 million with 3.4 million impressions.
- Genuine impact: 56 people moved from the educational content directly to the reporting page, and 55 visited support organisation pages.
- Performance: One top-performing post alone garnered 2.3k likes and 150 comments.
- Growing audience: Nearly 30% of Instagram Story views came from non-followers, proving the “organic” look successfully pierced the social media algorithm.
For Isobel and the team, Orlo enabled the creativity of the campaign to come to life, but also allowed its impact to be trackable and measurable.
Isobel highlighted Orlo’s First Comment Scheduling feature as a game-changer.
“The features was so helpful. I used it on this post ‘But they never hit me – South Wales Police | Facebook’, and it saved me so much stress in trying to get that first comment uploaded before anyone sees or engages with the post, also meaning the audience could find the relevant support, instantly.”
By scheduling the first comment, containing crucial advice and links, to publish simultaneously with the post, the team ensured the “reality” hit the second the “Insta” hook was seen, without the stress of manual uploading and the audience missing the point. In turn, monitoring the comments on these campaign posts using Orlo’s Unified Inbox allowed the team to see the impact in real time and respond to any reports or concerns in a timely manner.
Closing the feedback loop was also a core component of this campaign’s success. The digital team used Orlo to mention Isobel in positive comments, creating a dedicated folder of public praise. As Isobel noted, seeing a user say that they’d now “trust SWP to take them seriously when reporting an incident” is the ultimate validation of their work.
When it came to gauging the campaign’s success, the team utilised Orlo’s Campaign Report to generate a snapshot of how the posts had landed and pull relevant data instantly. Allowing Isobel and the team to prove the value and ROI of their creative thinking to senior leadership.
Isobel’s vision was clear – coercive control is hard to see when you are in it. By using realistic imagery, creative storytelling and a more human approach to their social strategy, South Wales Police proved that when police forces stop broadcasting and start engaging with their audience – on the channels where they are at, they don’t just get likes, they build the essential trust necessary to save lives.
Audience
1.36 million
reach across the campaign
Audience
3.4 million
impressions across the campaign
Audience
5,363 avg.
views on Instagram Stories
Engagement
47 clicks
on Instagram Stories links
Engagement
239 likes
on Instagram Stories
