EY’s mission is to build a better working world, and one of their key targets is achieving gender parity in the workplace. EY’s, ‘Women, Fast Forward. Time for gender parity, now.’report, revealed that greater equality produces higher GDP and improved productivity, that equality on corporate boards results in higher share prices and better leadership and equality in government results in greater prosperity. The economic case for parity in the workplace means the world cannot afford to ignore it any longer.

Our task was, using a limited budget, to bring those findings alive and target the most influential at Davos. We also had to bear in mind that the conversation around gender parity is a crowded space so standout was crucial.

Inspiration came from The World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report, 2014. This estimated that it would take until 2095 to achieve global gender parity in the workplace.

This inspired us to come up with the idea, Women Fast Forward, where we created an 80-year countdown clock, which starkly revealed the need to fast forward progress.

There are two parts to the campaign strategy. The first is establishing ourselves as a catalyst for debate and helping satisfy the genuine hunger for real data that highlights the economic imperative of gender parity.

After speaking to 400 companies on the economic importance of gender parity, EY released a report, ‘Women, Fast Forward. Time for Gender Parity is Now’. It provided insights into how to accelerate progress: ‘illuminating the path to leadership’, for women, we found that women more than men needed well defined, tangible goals and a sense in achieving these to have the confidence to aim for leadership positions, and mentorship from female role models; the need for more progressive corporate cultures for work-life balance, in order to facilitate women’s progress; and more supportive environments including education about conscious and unconscious bias against women.

The second part of our strategy was to go straight to the top, targeting men and women who could accelerate progress.

We launched at the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos. We built an ice wall to bear the countdown clock so that world leaders would be confronted with the glacial pace of change and launched our hashtag WomanFastForward calling for people to join in the conversation about how to speed up the clock.

We continued with International Woman’s Day, using the countdown device in the financial & business press, on line including blogs from EY leaders, Mark Weinberger, Berth Brooke-Marciniak and Uschi Schrieber across the Huffington Post and LinkedIn and through social media via WomenFastForward, LinkedIn and Facebook, including an, ‘I won’t wait’, Twibbon, asking everyone to change their profile picture. All of this activity was driven to either the WomanFastForward hashtag or the ey.com/womanfastforward, microsite.

The campaign achieved strong cut-through during a busy media period and generated a groundswell of influential followers for the campaign platform.

It exceeded LinkedIn industry engagement benchmarks by 211% with 1,296,451 impressions. The ‘Woman, Fast Forward’, Showcase Page, is the most successful showcase page in terms organic growth.

Those with real influence engaged most strongly. Those of Director/CXO seniority engaged at a rate 500% above LinkedIn industry benchmark.

20,196,438 impressions for tweets with the WomenFastForward hashtag over the campaign duration. WomanFastForward content exceeded Twitter industry engagement benchmarks by 71% and the top tweet for engagement achieved 163% above Twitter industry benchmark, 2.2K retweets and 2K favourites.

Earned media coverage to the value of $1.5m with 21 new pieces of content generated before International Woman’s Day.

We had success with people globally around the world changing their social profile pictures with the, ‘I won’t’, TWIBBON, resulting in an exceptional drive to site and long dwell times.