Hilton Prize Case Study

The Challenges

My marketing audit uncovered a lack of variety in the promotional content shared across social media and email, resulting in redundancy and low engagement rates. Furthermore, speakers were not being encouraged to share about their participation. Lastly, there was a big push for livestream attendees on social media with day-of coverage, including live tweeting and Instagram Stories, resulting in lower quality content that wasn’t motivating the audience to watch the panels.

The Solutions

My digital and creative strategy prioritized diverse visual storytelling, partnership with speakers and Prize laureates, and engaging, shareable content that appealed to the Foundation's online community at large in addition to philanthropic influencers, Foundation staff, and Hilton family.

I created a social toolkit for the speakers and engaged with them to ensure that the cross-posted content to their channels and Instagram Stories. I brought social media management, creative direction and graphic design in-house, resulting in a significant improvement in content quality and performance, especially in reach and post engagement.

2022 Prize

2023 Prize

Calls for Nominations & Prize Laureate Announcements

2022 Call for Nomination

289 views, 58 likes, 2 comments

2022 Laureate Announcement

733 views, 58 likes, 5 comments

Auditing the digital and creative communications efforts from the previous years, I noted which content performed well and what needed improvement. In earlier years, the Foundation had invested in two illustrated videos for social media, one to announce that nominations were open and another to announce the Prize laureate. The videos were not formatted well for Instagram, featured a black screen as the cover, and lacked engaging imagery. The videos had a very low ROI, with a few hundreds views and a handful of click-throughs.

As part of my strategy, I engaged a new illustration agency to create a video for the nomination announcement. I also decided to pivot away from an illustrated video for the Prize Laureate announcement, and instead repurposed an interview with the organization’s CEO.

2023 Call for Nomination

17,400 views, 59 likes, 4 comments

2023 Laureate Announcement

13,700 views, 79 likes, 5 comments

2023 Event Day Coverage

Because the livestream event was eight hours long, I knew it would be a challenge to get a virtual audience to attend the entire event. I brainstormed different options to increase livestream views, including SMS marketing to alert registrants when a panel was starting, timed emails scheduled beforehand, and Youtube alerts. These options were not feasible because of the live nature of the event and timings of panels being more unpredictable or changing at the last minute.

Ultimately, I encouraged a shift priorities away from solely increasing livestream views and invest more time and energy into post-event promotions of the recorded videos on Youtube. On the day-of, my communications coordinator and I partnered with speakers to share an intentional selection of photos and videos to promote the panels, which the speakers’ PR teams amplified on their own accounts.

The Results

For the 2023-2024 Hilton Humanitarian Prize Season, my team posted a third fewer social media posts leading up to the event and on the day-of and sent half as many marketing emails compared to 2022 promotional efforts. On X (Twitter), my strategy decreased day-of posts in half. This approach saved me and my team many hours of effort, enabling us to work on and complete other priority projects.

Despite a lower frequency of posts and emails, the content that was shared in 2023 was high quality, engaging, and met and surpassed all goals.

These were the results of my 2023 Hilton Prize Communications Strategy:

• Increased 2024 Prize nominations by 50% (the most nominations received in the Prize’s 28-year history)

• 500 event day posts on social media from speakers and attendees

• Over 5 million impressions of content tagged #HiltonPrize or @hiltonfoundation

• Significantly increased livestream view time to 36 minutes on average, compared to a 4 minute average watch time of the 2022 livestream

• 220% increase in Hilton Prize post engagement rate, from 4% to 13%

• Saved the Foundation over $50,000 in vendor and consulting costs