97% of young women in the UK have been sexually harassed, and 80% of cases happen in public spaces. Safe & the City set out to change that with a personal safety app that lets people anonymously report harassment they experience or witness.
Those reports only become useful at scale. Councils and police need to know where, when and what is happening on their streets before they can make them safer. So the app had to be quick to use and easy to trust, and then it had to reach enough people in the right places.
We started working with Safe & the City in 2018 on the app itself. We took it from mid-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity screens for onboarding, navigation, reporting, filtering, SOS and profile, then reviewed the test builds against the designs. We designed reporting as a press and hold, followed by a wheel to choose the type of incident, with reported incidents shown on the map along a route and an SOS option to send your location, call the police or sound an alarm.
We also designed the material around the app: Safe Site stickers for partner venues, a roller banner, and App Store screenshots, including one that introduced police station locations on the in-app map.
In 2021 Safe & the City added a way for users to share their reports with the Metropolitan Police, and we were asked to launch it. Working with Bromley, Croydon and Sutton councils and the Met, we created Safe Starts Here. People could opt in to share the details of a report with local authorities and police. It was never a way to report a crime, and every report stayed anonymous.
We wrote and animated the campaign: a woman walks through her day under watching eyes, jeering mouths and reaching hands, then reports what happened in the app. The lead ad came in three versions, one for each borough, in square and vertical formats, with social banners for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Prospecting ads on Facebook and Instagram asked people to download the app. Retargeting ran from 6pm to 2am on Friday and Saturday nights, when people were out, and switched the message to reporting what they experienced or saw.
Safe Starts Here ran from 22 September to 19 October 2021 and beat its targets for clicks, cost and installs: 5,652 link clicks against 3,250, a 2.44% click-through rate against a 0.97% benchmark, a cost per click of £0.35 against £0.62, and 420 app installs against 325, at £4.76 each against £6.15.
Downloads were 113% higher on Android and 90% higher on iOS than in the four weeks before, while deletions stayed almost the same, a sign that the people the campaign reached were keeping the app. The weekend retargeting earned its place too: conversion rate was 10.82% at weekends against 6.16% on weekdays. The campaign report concluded that Safe Starts Here is a strong template for localised campaigns in other London boroughs and beyond.
Outfly, a London brand, marketing and product agency. We designed the Safe & the City app’s screens and Safe Site material from 2018, then created and ran the Safe Starts Here campaign in autumn 2021 with Bromley, Croydon and Sutton councils and the Metropolitan Police.
Over four weeks it drove 420 app installs against a target of 325, at £4.76 per install against £6.15, with 5,652 link clicks and a 2.44% click-through rate against a 0.97% benchmark.
Split the job in two. Safe Starts Here used localised download ads for each borough and weekend evening retargeting about reporting. Downloads rose 113% on Android and 90% on iOS while deletions stayed almost flat.
A personal safety app where people can anonymously report sexual harassment they experience or witness, and opt in to share reports with local councils and police.
