Citi's annual day of service, Global Community Day (GCD), routinely mobilizes over 100,000 Citi volunteers around the world to engage in service activities that benefit local communities and help create thriving neighborhoods. To broaden awareness of the work of our community partners and Citi colleagues around the globe, this year we teamed up with the global content producer and distribution network, Tastemade, to create a social-first video campaign to shine a spotlight on the inspiring work happening in communities both large and small.
The partnership came to life through a series of social-first videos and an influencer engagement strategy to showcase both the positive impacts that Citi volunteers are making in communities around the word and to demonstrate some of the many ways that Citi is helping to advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We also leveraged this unique collaboration to generate excitement among Citi colleagues and recruit additional participants for Global Community Day events, which helped result in our largest Global Community Day to date.
Through this campaign we sought to engage new audiences with highly visual and consumable content that complemented our programmatic objectives. We were able to leverage Tastemade's unique consumer trends, data, and insights to identify white space opportunities to help inform our content strategy and inform how we engage in social media across the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field. Lastly, this partnership provided Tastemade employees with the opportunity to participate in Global Community Day events.
We partnered with Tastemade to help us tell the Global Community Day story because we saw opportunity and value in working with a non-traditional partner who could help us create a larger conversation around the importance of volunteerism – and the role that corporations can play in addressing social challenges. This partnership also enabled us to expand beyond our owned platforms to share memorable stories of impact with those outside our typical audience groups. In partnership with Tastemade, we developed a content production, distribution and engagement strategy that enabled us to tap into Tastemade's unique style of visual storytelling and robust social audiences, which resulted in highly engaging and sharable content. The content also resonated with colleagues within Citi, creating excitement in the lead up to Global Community Day 2018. This partnership helped create our largest and most engaging Global Community Day to date with over 115,000 Citi volunteers participating around the globe.
The collaboration had four main components: 1) a social-first video series highlighting the ongoing work of Citi's community partners and Citi volunteers around the world, 2) influencer activations at GCD events across multiple countries, 3) Tastemade employee engagement and live storytelling leveraging Instagram Stories, and 4) a social engagement call to action and Tastemade partner donation.
Partnership Videos: We created a series of social-first videos that highlighted six long-standing Citi community partners across four countries. Each video was shared on Tastemade's Facebook and Instagram pages and was also shared on Citi's social media channels. The videos featured Citi community partners that have a strong connection to our year-round volunteerism efforts and are involved in wide array of community work. Both Citi and Tastemade staff were on site for each video shoot to ensure each brand's point of view was accurately reflected and brought to life in the videos.
Influencer Activations: We engaged seven social media influencers across four countries to volunteer at Global Community Day activities and share their experiences with their Instagram audiences. These influencers were carefully vetted to ensure brand alignment. This was a new tactic for Citi in the citizenship space. We wanted to leverage the highly engaged followings and robust platforms of these select influencers to create a social rally that engaged additional audiences.
Tastemade Employee Engagement & Custom Instagram Stories: Tastemade employees volunteered alongside Citi volunteers at Global Community Day events in multiple countries and highlighted their experiences on Tastemade's Instagram Stories. This allowed followers to get an authentic and firsthand view of what it was like to participate in a volunteer event and served as mechanism for Tastemade to pilot CSR content with their employees and their audiences.
Donation to a Community Partner: Tastemade made a $25,000 donation to longtime Citi community partner, Feeding Children Everywhere. This donation helped reinforce Tastemade's dedication to ending childhood hunger. Each video posted to Tastemade's channels also included a reference to their donation to further underscore their commitment to social good and ending hunger.
The videos were featured on Tastemade's Facebook and Instagram channels leading up to Global Community Day and were also amplified across Citi's social media platforms and internally through Citi's intranet. The campaign delivered 9.5 million impressions and 81,000 social engagements across Tastemade's platforms alone. Over 1.4 million minutes of content from the series was consumed across Tastemade's Facebook pages. The average percent viewed on Facebook was 5.83% and the average engagement rate on Instagram was 2.4%, all in line with or exceeding Tastemade's benchmarks.
Several of the videos stood out with exceptionally strong performance. The video celebrating the work of the Banco Di Alimentos (National Food Bank) in Mexico had a Facebook engagement rate of 1.25%, which is 50% above Tastemade's average Facebook engagement rate. Also on Facebook, a video featuring Citi volunteers and the organization NPower based in Dallas, TX had a 62.5% Reflection Rate, with over 50% of all reactions being associated with "Love". On Instagram, the video highlighting U.S.-based partner Feeding Children Everywhere had a very strong engagement rate at 4%.
The influencer activation component of the campaign resulted in in over 9.5K likes and 200 comments on Instagram.
Beyond these impressive metrics, this campaign successfully utilized engaging content to showcase the positive impacts that Citi volunteers are making in communities around the world to entirely new audiences while also raising awareness around volunteerism and the role that corporations can play in helping to advance the global Sustainable Development Goals agenda.
