ABOUT

Background:
beVisioneers is a global fellowship that equips innovators aged 16 to 28 with the training, expert support and resources to bring their planet-positive projects to life.

At it's core, the offering is a 12-month hybrid-learning program that focuses on implementing each Fellow’s project. beVisioneers aims to train 1000 Fellows annually by 2025. Funded by a donation from Mercedes-Benz, beVisioneers provides the program free of charge to all Fellows and provides basic living and technology support for those who could not otherwise participate. Upon completing the intensive 12-month program, Fellows continue to receive support to scale their projects and develop their leadership skills. By fostering local, regional and global exchange among our ever-growing community of Fellows, mentors and experts, we amplify impact today and help build the environmental leaders of tomorrow.

The Brief:
We first started working with TheDoSchool in 2023 to help bring their new fellowship to life: beVisioneers. It was a completely new fellowship, so needed building from the ground up, including the brand look and feel along with all their marketing materials.

Target Audience:
Phase 01 Target Audience:
18-28 year olds in three regions, Europe, South Africa and India, with a slightly higher weighting toward the South Africa Region

Phase 02 Target Audience:
Continuing on with the 18-28 year olds in Europe, South Africa and India with an additional target audience of South Korea, USA and Mexico.

Execution:

Strategy:
For phase 01, we focused on building the brand, with a major goal of TheDoSchool being to make sure the brand is perceived as trustworthy and professional to ensure they had enough credibility to engage the target audience.

We split the campaign into four blocks, working backwards from the Applications Close date. Block 01 consisted of some initial research and strategy building with local agencies so that we could understand the regions as best as we could.

Block two consisted of starting to build the content for paid and organic. A big part of this block was creating the hero piece of content, working with local agencies to capture groups and individuals, that were in our target-audience.

In Block three we launched, running an initial burst on Meta and TikTok for 14 days to raise awareness and build and understanding of how the target audience engaged with the advertising. We A/B tested the performance between optimising for on-platform leads vs. website leads, using our learning from this to help us approach block four. The results from the A/B test showed that optimising for on-platform leads was the most effective, with a huge amount of traffic coming from TikTok.

Block four saw us split prospecting into 2 additional bursts to allow budget to be focused where needed. We ran targeting to capitalise on activity from block 1 and prospecting in block 2. The outcome was a burst 2 focusing on building the number of female applicants in Europe and South Africa. Burst 3 narrowed the focus further to target activity in Europe. We then introduced extra budget which allowed us to test LinkedIn, building out country-specific campaigns.

Phase 02 saw us going for a similar approach by breaking it down into four blocks, an initial block to re-align on strategy and build a content bank for organic and paid.

Block two saw us launch the second campaign across organic and paid social, focusing on brand awareness, and bringing people into the top-of-funnel, especially those in new target countries.

The focus in block three was bringing in potential applicants through brand awareness, whilst giving the audience reasons to apply and telling them more about the programme through retargeting.

Block four was the final full month of advertising, we increased CTA’s and reasons to apply as the end date edged closer to drive applicants.

Implementation:
We wanted the content pushed out to be relatable and fresh looking, we opted for creating a brand with a slight brutalism nod, whilst including pops of colour through gradients which would be implemented through static graphics, video formats and more.

We worked alongside agencies across the regions to produce a hero piece of content that reflected the target audience. The idea was to have individuals who represented each country in a unique setting reading the same script. This created a lot of content that could be cut together and refresh the creative if needed.

The content had to evolve throughout the phases to better drive conversions. We adopted an “always learning” approach. We reviewed the content every two weeks to give the ads enough time to properly bed-in and show results but made sure we checked it daily to allow us to be reactive to performance.

We took a slightly different strategy with TikTok, launching with the hero video in South Africa with a traffic goal to build brand awareness and drive potential applicants to the website.

We launched ads in East Asia and North America to test if the cost of advertising was cheaper on TikTok than Meta. As we had limited ad spend. When we had learnings from TikTok, we would evaluate the ad performance to decide whether to keep ads running or move it to Meta.

Challenges:
In phase 01, our key challenge was building trust in the brand, as it was a new fellowship, building trust and driving enough excitement and interest within the target audience was going to be hard, which was one of the biggest drivers of using on-the-ground agencies to capture the content under our instruction. This made the content relatable with their peers and seeing a representation of them in the content from the beginning.

With this, we faced the challenge of creating content that all fit in together. To make sure the final output was aligned, we set a clear brief to make sure the same camera profiles and settings were used (within reason) to the different teams, and content was shot similarly in terms of movement and composition, this was vital to make sure that each piece of content we shot had a certain level of cohesion to work together.

Combined 01+02 cohort results:
Fellows: 600
Applications Started: 7,105
Impressions: 23,374,486
"Apply Now" Clicks: 13,333