Objectives

Founded in 1945 with the creation of the CARE Package®, CARE is a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty. CARE places special focus on working alongside women and girls because, equipped with the proper resources, they have the power to lift whole families and entire communities out of poverty. In 2020, CARE worked in over 100 countries and reached more than 90 million people.

Since 2003, CARE has hosted its annual CARE National Conference (CNC) in May in Washington, D.C. Thousands of CARE advocates have come to the conference to advocate for the rights of the world’s most marginalized people – particularly women and girls – by focusing on policies that improve U.S. foreign assistance programs, address the lack of access to resources and opportunities, and foster lasting change for generations to come.

The COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020 made it impossible to host an in-person gathering, even though the very people we advocate for have been the hardest hit by the pandemic. The show had to go on. CARE moved quickly to skill up, learn new technology, and became a leader in the virtual event sector with the CARE 2020 Virtual Summit.

The objectives of the Virtual Summit were for attendees to:

• Learn how COVID-19 presents new challenges for the people CARE serves, particularly women and girls
• Engage with other passionate citizen advocates across the country
• Connect with CARE’s work around the world
• Take civic action toward advancing gender equality and ending global injustice worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic

Strategy and Execution

Partners: the CARE Virtual Summit was a live event streamed to Facebook Live and NowThis.  Since the event was live streamed we were able to engage a national and global audience, with attendees from 50 U.S. states and 75 countries.

Engaging content: passionate advocates learned about the latest policy issues affecting women and girls globally, and heard from 21 individual speakers.

Compelling speakers: CARE advocates heard from Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, Stacey Abrams, Senator Cory Booker, Amanda Gorman, CARE’s Global Advocate Iman and CARE Ambassador Bellamy Young as well as Representatives Susan Brooks, Grace Meng, and many more.

Peer-to-peer engagement: the virtual event was also supported by a custom mobile app, which allowed for interaction among small groups. Attendees could also access the live webinar, on-demand content, engagement tools, a resource library, and donation tools via the app.

Results

• 400,000 Facebook views – This metric met our goal of reaching a larger audience via a virtual platform than we historically have with our in-person CNC conference.
• 5,000 live attendees from 50 U.S. states and 75 countries – This metric met our goal of reaching a global audience with our broadcast and engaging citizen advocates from every state in the U.S.
• 378,846,288 media impressions – This metric shattered our goal of creating a strong media moment for CARE’s COVID-19 fighting work during the beginning months of the global pandemic and stay-at-home orders.
• 17,503 letters sent to Congress in support of women-focused COVID funding – This metric meets CARE Action and CARE’s broader organizational goals of fostering citizen advocacy around CARE’s legislative priorities.
• Secured 21 leading speakers from around the world – This metric surpassed our goal of broadening our roster of speakers who could join from the ease and comfort of their home whereas an in-person event and the inability to pre-record for a live one-time event may have kept them from getting to a “yes” for a CARE speaker opportunity. We were able to engage a bi-partisan roster of speakers, which is another goal of CARE – to work across the aisle for women’s issues.

Media