Re-educating Google: how Rapp helped Mermaids reach the parents of transgender kids
Rapp won ‘SEO - Best Use of Content’ at The Drum Awards for Search in 2021, with its campaign for Mermaids. To reach parents at an early stage in their searches, the project sought to re-educate the world‘s biggest search engine and its algorithm. Here, the team behind the entry explains the strategy.
Mermaids is a charity and advocacy organisation that supports transgender youth.
Transgender children are twice as likely to contemplate suicide if their parents don’t accept them when they come out. But most parents aren’t equipped to handle this life-changing moment. So, with nowhere to turn they look to Google for advice – and run straight into misleading, transphobic content instead of the support they desperately need to help them protect their children.
Our campaign’s first objective was to make sure that parents saw the honest information they needed when they searched for help, rather than hateful misinformation. Its second was to help them reach Mermaids UK (the UK’s leading charity for trans children).
So we took on the algorithm of the world’s biggest search engine.
Strategy
We mapped out the treacherous search journeys that led parents to Mermaidsuk.org.uk. And we identified the common terms, phrases and behavior patterns parents search around the time of their child coming out as transgender. Analysis of the data unearthed two key insights.
- Googling obvious search terms like ‘transgender’ or ‘gender dysphoria’ brings up transphobic content in the search results. These are often searched towards the end of parents’ journeys.
- Unexpected terms like ‘bullying’ or ‘toys’ show up much earlier in their journeys but are no less relevant – and when searched they don’t bring up transphobic content.
- We used these unexpected terms to build a bank of questions parents needed answers to, from ‘Is being transgender just a phase for my child?’ to ‘What should I do if my transgender child is bullied?’
Then we set about ensuring parents found honest answers to these questions before they encountered transphobia when they took to Google.
Solution
We helped parents keep their children safe when they were at their most vulnerable by ‘Re-educating Google’ – transforming parents’ search results from hateful to helpful.
We used the unexpected terms that parents searched early in their journeys to tag honest, heartfelt films we created ourselves. So when they went to Google in desperate need of advice, they found our content before they ran into inaccurate, transphobic articles and videos. This meant we intercepted parents before their journeys led to hateful and misleading results.
Our content – informed by our data – answered the questions we knew parents craved answers to. We gave them insightful, supportive advice from real experts. Including a headteacher of a school with numerous trans pupils to answer, ‘What should my transgender child’s school be doing to help?’ A trans teenager to answer, ‘How do I help my transgender child tell their friends?’ Or even a legal expert to answer, ‘What should I do if my transgender child is bullied?’
And the more parents found our advice the more search journeys we could analyze, allowing us to fine-tune the terms we tagged our content with even further. This means we can reach and support future viewers even sooner, at a moment when their children’s safety is at risk and timing is everything.
So now when parents search for help. Google responds differently.
This meant Mermaids was able to intercept parents before they reached dangerous content, creating dramatic results and allowing the campaign to give over 400 hours of potentially life-saving advice.
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