Facebook Elevate was launched in 2018 by a group of enterprising Black and Latinx & Hispanic Facebook employees who wanted to take action and positively impact communities of color. Ever since its inception, Elevate has had one mission: to accelerate the economic success and impact of Black and Latinx & Hispanic communities.
To this end, Elevate is a program that provides free access to digital marketing courses, potential job opportunities, and coaching from Facebook experts to help Black and Latinx & Hispanic small businesses, jobseekers, content creators, nonprofits, and community leaders. In 2020, we witnessed the massive debilitation of small businesses, especially among Black and Latinx & Hispanic owned businesses, who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic economic downturn.
Elevate recognizes that socioeconomic barriers, racial inequality and unequal access to learning opportunities continue to limit Black and Latinx and Hispanic communities in the US. To help counteract these hurdles, we set an audacious three-year goal to reach 1 million members of the Black community and 1 million members of the Latinx and Hispanic community with free training in digital skills to help their business survive and thrive. To meet this goal, we needed to raise awareness of the Elevate program as a resource to these communities when they most needed help.
We launched a multi-platform digital marketing campaign that focused on:
Driving awareness about Elevate
Driving target audiences to engage with Elevate educational programming and training.
As a part of reaching these communities with training, Elevate took an integrated approach. This included partnering with experts and businesses within the community, adding more program offerings, launching a multichannel digital campaign to not only highlight, but connect, these communities with the specific resources and educational training available, and launching a website that addressed the unique needs of each group of people so they could dive in deeper and take action.
In line with Facebook’s commitment to support diverse suppliers, we partnered with Ten35, a Chicago-based multicultural advertising agency, to develop the creative campaign, along with the Nigerian-American multidisciplinary artist Temi Coker, who imbued his signature touch to the creative concept. Temi’s distinct illustrative style and vibrant color palette was integrated throughout the campaign and was meant to be a reflection of the community.
To continue to add engaging program offerings, we hosted conversations and fireside chats with public figures, industry leaders and members of the Black and Latinx & Hispanic community by going live on our Facebook Page. This was complemented by the business spotlights, Live Q&As, and chats with Black and Latinx & Hispanic entrepreneurs on our Instagram page. Leveraging Facebook Live, Instagram Live, Instagram Stories and Facebook video ads as key vehicles to reach our audiences with training, created an experiential virtual classroom with teachers who were relatable and could speak from personal experience. Amplifying these perspectives and experiences was critical not only for a general audience, but contributed greatly to motivating people to learn and take action.
To help us reach our target audiences in our multi-channel digital campaign, we worked with media publishers such as Blavity and Remezcla who have high affinity with our audiences. Knowing their media consumption habits were mixed across video, audio, and social media, we ran a variety of programmatic buys that aligned to them.
Bringing it all together, we launched a website for Elevate that served as a digital learning hub, which provided a personalized user experience among our five audience segments with clear call to actions to learn more about Elevate, sign up for relevant programming and connect with training content and resources that were tailored to their individual needs.
Striving for equity means closing the opportunity – and resource – gap for communities of color. One way we measure success is by tracking the number of Black and Latinx & Hispanic community members we are able to impact with our educational training. By the end of December, we started to see results:
Achieved 84% of progress towards our 3 year goal of reaching 1MM members of the Black community and 1MM members of the Latinx & Hispanic community with our training in less than 6 months
Increased our social following by 491X
Hosted 11 Elevate Live virtual sessions with nearly 4M total views
Paired 250 Black and Latinx & Hispanic mentees with a Facebook employee mentor
Conducted 60 hours of 1:1 training on digital marketing and social media branding
This is the first step we’re taking towards driving economic equity and growth for each of these communities- small businesses, nonprofits, students and jobseekers, community leaders, and creators. While the road to equity may be long, we are committed to the futures of Black and Latinx & Hispanic communities today and everyday. And while we’ve achieved 84% of a multiyear training goal in less than six months, there is still significant work to be done to equalize the playing field for people of color, and we’re in it for the long run.
