Ahead of the 2019 Nigerian presidential elections, ONE approached us to develop an engagement tool to reach more young people as part of their Vote Your Future campaign, designed to engage Nigerian youth with the political process and inspire them to vote.

By the end of the project, the tool (Quiz: What’s The Perfect Career For You?) had 51,000 visitors; with an impressive 37% going on to sign ONE’s Youth Declaration. Since the quiz offered users the promise of a personalised insight, we saw a very high level of engagement and more than 20,000 organic shares.

Organic Whatsapp shares were so prolific they resulted in almost double the number of visitors compared to paid Facebook advertising, and each Whatsapp share generated an additional signature – at no additional cost.

Developing a personalised, shareable engagement tool

As a UK-based agency, creating a tool for such a different cultural and technological context presented a welcome challenge. Working closely with ONE’s Nigeria team, we were able to identify a number of strategic considerations:

• Nigeria is a particularly diverse country. The tool needed a compelling link to ONE’s Youth Declaration, as well as broad appeal to young voters. We settled on the issues of employment and the desire for a fulfilling career.
• We relied on feedback from ONE’s youth activists to help us inject cultural references throughout and a prototype was tested by around 100 Nigerian young people for feedback before going live, to ensure we’d hit the right note.
• Internet access in Nigeria is mostly via feature phones – connections can be slow and data tends to be pay-as-you-go, so users avoid data-draining sites. To ensure a quick load time and limit drop-off, we opted for a mobile-first, stripped back design.
• The mobile-first approach paid off – drop off was incredibly low, with a completion rate of 87%. Interestingly, visitors who received the quiz via Whatsapp were nine times more likely to sign that those who came from Facebook shares – perhaps due to the one-to-one nature of this type of share.

What’s the take-away?

Understanding the technological and social context a digital tool will exist in is vital. By designing a tool with proven appeal amongst the target demographic, optimising for mobile, and rigorously testing prototypes we were able to create a tool that inspired more than 19,000 young people to sign the Youth Declaration.