Founded in 2008, the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women (10KW) program is a global initiative that fosters economic growth by providing women entrepreneurs around the world with a business and management education, mentoring and networking, and access to capital. To date, the program has reached small business owners in over 56 countries and has more than 10,000 graduates.
Having reached its milestone 10th anniversary in 2018, we wanted to reinstate our commitment to female entrepreneurs and to strengthen associations with Goldman Sachs at a key moment for gender equality discussions in the news and culture. Hence, the objective was to build awareness of the program and its global impact. To that end, we created and launched an integrated campaign entitled Portraits. The marketing efforts around this campaign are detailed below.
In corporate headquarters all over the world hangs a symbol of traditional leadership: the CEO portrait. But these portraits don’t always reflect the diversity of those who lead.
From an entrepreneur building children’s furniture in Nairobi to a manufacturer of organic ayurvedic care products in Hyderabad, graduates of 10,000 Women are leading and growing their businesses, and creating a ripple effect of impact in their communities. Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women is committed to empowering these unsung leaders, telling their stories and creating the CEO portrait they deserve. In doing so, we aimed to flip a familiar visual trope on its head and celebrate the success of our program graduates at the same time.
The spot we created follows the delivery of a wrapped package to Ayo Megbope, a graduate of the 10,000 Women program, intercut with shots of Ayo interacting with her employees and members of her community on the way to her catering business, No Left Overs. Finally, Ayo receives and unwraps her CEO portrait before mounting it proudly in her business. In parallel, we hear her voice-over describing the story the ripple-effect impact that occurs when a woman leads a business: economies grow and communities prosper.
While Ayodeji’s story is inspiring and uplifting, we wanted to feature a number of other graduates as well and leveraged digital, print and social to tell even more graduate stories. Print ads, digital assets and social posts were developed specifically to showcase the range of businesses, geographies, and entrepreneurs that this program has reached.
The print and digital components of the campaign feature the same CEO-style portraiture as our video, serving as the visual thread among assets across channels. The headline copy reads “What changes when a woman leads a business? Everything.” Ad copy goes on to say “we believe that creating opportunity leads to more opportunity,” underscoring the multiplier effect that female entrepreneurs create in their communities through revenue growth and job creation.
We amplified the campaign even further through organic and paid social media efforts, including the firm’s then-newly launched Instagram account, and adapting the core campaign assets to work across various formats including video, animations, carousels, a Twitter poll and a conversational ad unit. Through social, we were able to tell the stories of 11 additional graduates across 5 different countries.
The timing of the campaign aligned with numerous contextual editorial opportunities, and print ads ran in Glamour’s Women of the Year and New York Magazine’s Women & Power issues, as well as Fortune’s Most Powerful Women issue, alongside a sponsorship of the MPW event itself. Additional efforts to round out the campaign included custom mobile, paid and owned social media, digital partnerships with The New York Times and Washington Post, a podcast partnership with The Skimm, a print insertion with the Economist, and newsletter partnerships with Daily Skimm and Devex Newswire.
Social Media
We successfully achieved the dual objectives of driving both awareness of 10,000 Women and generating engagement with the social ads. Overall, the campaign drove 62.6M impressions, generated 1.1M engagements and received 13M video views.
Partnerships
Our partnerships with The New York Times and Washington Post significantly extended our reach across our target audiences, driving a total of 8.7M impressions and 5.8M video views.
Custom Mobile
Our mobile partners (Kargo, Glassview and Parsec) greatly increased our reach, garnering nearly 6.5M impressions. Custom mobile also drove significant engagement, with over 462K user-initiated video views.
Hulu
Overall, our Hulu program was successful at expanding our reach, garnering over 2M views with a completion rate of 98.17%. Our engagement was extremely strong– our cumulative CTR of 0.04% is double Hulu’s benchmark of 0.02%.
Newsletters
Our placements in Devex not only extended our reach by 227K impressions, but our performance was extremely strong– our average CTR of 0.61% far exceeds the industry benchmark of 0.05%. The Skimm was even more effective with our paid newsletters driving almost 4M unique email opens, and we garnered nearly 32K clicks for an overall CTR of 0.80%
Podcasts
The three Skimm podcast episodes we sponsored collectively drove over 140K streams/downloads, with a completion rate of 70.66%.
YouTube
Throughout the duration of its run on YouTube, we garnered 3.8M impressions, 7K+ clicks and 945K video views.
