EmpowHER: Customer Research, Content Strategy & Execution

EmpowHER, a BA Women initiative, is an application-based, 8-week intensive summer program in Washington, D.C. designed for progressive women. EmpowHER will help participants, who already have Washington, D.C.-based internships, prepare for and succeed in their positions—and help to launch their careers.

This summer program has been around since 2012, but was never officially named and needed a little extra love to support the BA Women's Alliance's growth goals. We conducted customer research and helped to name this new program, build a brand to support it, craft a content strategy, launch a new website, and execute social, email, and video against this strategy.

CHALLENGE: Name and build a brand to support this summer program, increase participant enrollment 82% from 2018, and increase revenue streams

STRATEGY: Create a holistic content marketing strategy rooted in the data discovered from our customer research, clearly identify key target audiences, execute on platforms that we know our target audiences actively participate in and build an email list.

TACTICS:

• Interviewed 7 stakeholders
• Interviewed 20 target audience members to learn about the audiences in question and test a financial forecasting hypothesis
• Created and distributed a survey to 100 prospects
• Named and built a logo and branding system for EmpowHER
• Built and executed against a multi-platform content strategy
• Created donation packages
• Created and distributed 22 emails
• Built out a six-part donation funnel and Thank you page series
• Launched 2 lead-capture forms to generate leads for both future applications and donations
• Conducted a video shoot and produced and published six montage videos
• Launched a YouTube channel
• Launched social media campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube
• Launched an EmpowHER Alumnae LinkedIn Group
• Built and launched EmpowHERWomen.org

RESULTS:

In the first 90 days of executing against our content strategy, we achieved the following:

• Increased average general email open rates by 25%
• Decreased the number of social media posts made by 4% across all platforms
• Increased social media followers by 18% across all platforms
• Increased average social media engagement by 205% across all platforms
• Increased average social media engagement rate by 72% across all platforms
• Increased donations by 53% YOY (January through June)

Additionally, they successfully increased participation enrollment by 86%. We've had the absolute best time working with this team of BA(dass) Women and are excited about their ongoing success!