The Garland Black Friday / Cyber Monday Campaign
As the head of marketing, design and communications for The Garland, I was responsible for leading the creative development and integrated marketing strategy for the annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign, including webpage design, imagery, and copy, email marketing and drip campaigns, and social media.
The Webpage
The E-blasts
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
