Raise Your Hand for safer workplaces

“Young workers watch the movement. Raise your hand for safer workplaces across BC.”

Raise You Hand is a brand new campaign from WorkSafeBC dedicated to promote workplace health and safety for the workers and employers in British Columbia, Canada.

Raise Your Hand is a young worker movement focused around worker rights: the right to know about hazards at your job and how to protect yourself, the right to participate in making sure your job and workplace are safe and healthy, the right to the right to refuse unsafe work. Unlike many young worker safety campaigns, which take a ‘shock and awe’ approach to scare young workers from being unsafe on the job, Raise Your Hand focuses on the positive steps young workers can take to prevent injury and death at work.
Driven by the insight that many young workers don’t know what to do when faced with an unsafe situation, this movement shares that the first step is to know your rights, and the way to find out about your rights is to ask. The idea of raising your hand is inspired by the fact that many young workers have recently left school, or may still be in a school environment where you raise your hand to find answers to what you don’t know.

The campaign is found where the target audience – youth aged 18-25 – gather, at summer festivals and online.  Key elements of the campaign are the Raise Your Hand anthem (see above) and buttons that people can customize and either wear or create digital versions to put online. The creative theme is inspired by 70s movements – psychedelic album covers, peace, love.
The 70’s inspiration came about because of the affiliation of grassroots movement with that decade. RYH is very much about empowerment and participation to join this movement to make a difference.

The Raise Your Hand campaign contains many features as seen in this post and very important is the online strategy including a Button Generator, anthem video, ringtones and mp3 downloads, mashup of event anthem videos, Raise Your Hand Blog (currently features Nick Perry, a young worker who was injured on the job and is now a WorkSafeBC representative who visits schools around BC to discuss young worker safety) and of course educational information about the 3 rights, key statistics and tips on staying safe.

Social Media is also important to reach the target audience. For each event they will send a young person who acts as the Raise Your Hand correspondent to capture video and images to share on YouTube, a Facebook Fan page, Flickr and Twitter.

“Traditional media — like TV, radio and magazines — are not typically where young people get their information anymore,” explains Scott McCloy, WorkSafeBC’s director of Communications, who oversaw development of the campaign. “We knew we had to reach young workers where they spend most of their time — online. And we needed to present the information in an authentic and engaging way.”

Raise Your Hand will be at major festivals throughout BC this summer: Virgin Fest, Rock the Bells, the Dragon Boat Festival, Merritt Mountain Music Festival, Crankworx, and Nakusp. In September they will participate in Campus Crawls at universities and colleges throughout BC. Raise You Hand will have a branded tent and ambassadors at the events.
The three key activities will be the opportunity to have your photo taken and a create a customized button, participate in an anthem contest to create mashup music videos for each event, or play the Know Your Rights Plinko Board game for a chance to win Tshirts and trucker hats. These will be supported by other activities and displays. Their open guitar cases will have Raise Your Hand buttons for people to take, rather than asking for money.

Posters:

Twitter

Digg

del.icio.us

Stumble It!

Facebook

From the Osocio archive

See this campaign from the Osocio archive