At Ask for Evidence, we know the best way to get everyone assessing the claims they come across is to get young people doing it and the best way to get a message across to young people is to have a young person tell it to them. That’s why in 2017 we developed the Evidence Hunter activity pack, working with the Scouts to encourage young people to critically think about claims they see. This was a huge success reaching over an estimated 250,000 young people, being featured in Scouting Magazine certainly helped spread the word.
[Scouts weighing up the claim ‘Being kind to others makes you happier’]
By March 2020 we found that some of our claims were becoming outdated and we updated the activity pack to reflect the societal changes that had already happened (it’s really hard to find an advert on social media these days without it being labelled as advertising - win!). Not only that, the activity pack was also featured as campaign of the week on Mumsnet, the largest parent forum in the UK with around 7 million unique visitors per month clocking up around 100 million page views.
But we didn’t stop there, using feedback from young people to find out what mattered to them, we developed 3 animations to demonstrate how false claims can still make it onto social media. These animations were then promoted on instagram and have received over 50,000 views by 13-17 year olds! This is absolutely fantastic and hopefully a gateway for young people to #AskForEvidence.
[Evidence Hunter activity pack and Evidence Hunter animation]
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