Canesten - The Truth, Undressed

Stripping away shame and over-sexualisation through boundary-pushing education.

The Truth, Undressed is an education-at-scale initiative that helps young people learn about intimate health within the education system, but without any of the usual clichés, taboos, or euphemisms.

Canesten and AnalogFolk's strategy focused on achieving long-term societal change, by fundamentally changing how intimate health is taught and scaling this impact to a wider youth audience.

To achieve this, we know education must happen early on and in a suitable environment. So our primary target was young people aged 11-18, who have never experienced infections before.

It was also vital to target and support teachers to run lessons in classrooms. By collaborating with the PSHE Association, AnalogFolk and Canesten created a unique programme consisting of comprehensive lesson plans and an online educational hub, designed specifically to be taught as part of the national curriculum’s compulsory UK school syllabus.

For scale and awareness, our wider target were aged 16 to 24.
To reach them in a relevant, authentic and appropriate way we created disruptive and impactful educational films across TikTok and Instagram, channels where they are most exposed to harmful online misinformation.

- 1.5k teaching material downloads
- 150k students reached through lesson plans taught under the National Curriculum in UK schools
- 42k website monthly visits
- 3.4 million young people reached on social media

And, partnering up with Mind + Matter - 163 million people reached through organic media coverage across all major news outlets, including articles like ‘Lessons on female anatomy to battle porn unreality’ in The Times.

Research from the PSHE Association found that the learning was highly relevant. 100% of students were engaged by the lessons and expressed the teacher guidance was helpful.

We also invested in 19 in-depth interviews with content users aged 16-23 who told us they found the content relatable and informative.

The Truth, Undressed has won dozens of world-class, globally recognised awards.