ABOUT

Concept
The Girls’ Network empowers some of the UK’s least-advantaged girls, working with their schools to encourage their development through support and mentoring. The pandemic means their work is more vital than ever, but donations are down.
They needed a campaign that could cut through in the busy Christmas period driving awareness and donations. With no budget for media, it had to earn attention.

While many care about gender equality, the issue has lost its power to arrest or surprise. And 2020 was a year of bad news – and a downturn in UK charity donations. We needed a different take to seize attention. And while charity donations were down, online shopping was up. We saw an opportunity.

Execution
The Empowerium . com is a mock online equality store. With a ‘product range’ – a hammer for smashing glass ceilings, pay gap filler, lean-in heels promoted via The Girls Network's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn using fake product ads.
When users clicked ‘buy’ they were taken to an error screen and encouraged to make a real difference by donating to The Girls’ Network instead.
Though humorous and satirical, the issues in play here are anything but funny. So we had to work hard to tread the line between provocative and offensive.

Results
The campaign is very different from others on the issue and has been a huge success delivering:
- unprecedented engagement for a campaign from The Girls’ Network, with £0 media spend
2000%+ engagement on Facebook
- 30k+ impressions on the first Instagram post (they had c.5000k followers at launch)
- Donations 10x higher than their previous campaign
- The campaign was covered in national media including the BBC, Glamour, and The Big Issue.
- Initially intended to run for a month, TGN is using The Empowerium “store” throughout 2021 to engage donors and partners