The Aunties and Women’s Health Victoria's online training program Support Talk was an idea 18 months in the making.
The program is aimed at equipping mentors with the skills to respond to disclosures of gender-based violence and discrimination.
The initiative reflects a change in cultural attitudes in the workplace, founding Auntie and Clemenger BBDO Melbourne senior copywriter Phoebe Sloane says.
“We’re experiencing a new generation who won’t tolerate this kind of behaviour, alongside a current generation who are rising into leadership positions and becoming more empowered to speak up, take action and make the industry better for them and the women around them,” she tells AdNews.
For Sloane, time was always the teams’ biggest hurdle in developing the program. Finding time to meet or sticking to timelines was challenging because The Aunties are 100% volunteer run, she says.
“We had multiple people working across multiple agencies, who work busy jobs. So, being flexible while also finding project flow was a tricky balance to strike and we didn’t always get it right.
“Women’s Health Victoria were incredibly accommodating and patient, meeting with us sometimes out of regular hours, lots of email comms and allowing us to shift timings when we needed to. We’re very grateful to them for adapting to our Aunties ways of working.”
Gender-based discrimination and violence exists in the industry at a higher rate than the national average. One in four women in the industry reported being bullied, undermined or harassed in some way at work over the last 12 months according to recent Create Space Survey results.
Disclosures in a mentoring context also aren’t always work-place related, Sloane says.
“With rise in domestic violence rates, and one Australian woman murdered at the hands of an intimate partner every 4 days, there’s also a chance someone might disclose family violence. And the steps to respond are the same. Support Talk covers both potential personal and professional circumstances,” she says.
Understanding this context, and where the roles of a mentor figure sit, as they are often regarded as a safe and neutral person, made Sloane realise how important and impactful it could be if more people knew how to respond to these situations.
She wanted to pause our mentor programs until we had this training resource for Aunties and the industry.
“After discovering there was no specific training program to equip mentors with the skills required to respond to disclosures, or available for the mentoring dynamic, we wanted to create our own, and gift this knowledge to the industry.”
The partnership between The Aunties and WHV came about very serendipitously, Sloane says.
After reaching out and enquiring at several places to see if they had a mentor-based disclosure training, and discovering there wasn’t, Sloane was on an industry call hosted by shEqual/WHV, where the teams were discussing opportunities to help each other.
“And very fortunately, Linden Deathe heard me express my desire for such training,” she says.
“We had a coffee and then I was introduced to Lauren Zappa, manager for gender capacity building, and the rest was history. We were so lucky Linden and Lauren believed in the need for this in our industry (and beyond) and building training programs to improve gender-equity outcomes was entirely in their wheelhouse.”
The Aunties had the benefit of being the creator and the audience of the training.
“From the get-go we wanted to make something we’d (a) like to complete ourselves and (b) be proud to share with fellow peers in the industry. The Aunties are a collective of creatives - from art directors, editors, designers, social media specialists, PR gurus…we are extremely fortunate to have the best in this business,” Sloane says.
Having creative autonomy was critical too. It’s a stylised help-line call centre world, that was brought to life by director Lizzy Bailey and the whole Poppet team, she says.
“Anchoring the training within this visual world has resulted in the training feeling like it has a story, relevance and an inherent sense of care. We were deliberate in wanting the training films to use real experts from WHV and Aunties to build connection with the viewer and reinforce the reality of the problem.”
Establishing the Support Talks program has been a collective effort from more than 50 people across multiple organisations, companies and made up of mostly industry volunteers.
From the writing to the design, from beginning to end, the process has been extremely collaborative, Sloane says.
“The Aunties were constantly guided by the expertise of the team at Women’s Health Victoria, while The Aunties provided creative firepower to bring the project to life, as well as pathways to connect to industry through their platform and networks.
“Nat Taylor and Beth Malcher at Poppet Productions, and Bailey, were the phenomenal team behind all of our films within the training. We had an incredible day on set with volunteers, equipment donations, studio support — everyone came together to create a suite of really engaging films to bring the learnings to life.
“Clemenger BBDO kindly helped us with post resourcing with Jamie Williams and Jen Cahir kindly editing, sound-mixing and grading. A massive team effort from many teams!
The thing about Support Talk, Sloane says, is that one component is tailored to the advertising industry.
“It will be adaptable in future to potentially go into other industries. Mentoring occurs in so many other fields — it would be a dream for Support Talk to provide help across industries and across the country to anyone who might need it.”
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