HeForShe — the United Nations global solidarity movement for gender equality — was facing challenges growing momentum when it approached our agency in June 2018. With just a few months before its four-year anniversary, the leaders at HeForShe saw an opportunity to reignite momentum around the movement.

The UN Women’s HeForShe movement launched in 2014 with the goal of achieving gender equality in our lifetime. Emma Watson delivered an impassioned speech at the UN Generally Assembly, urging men to advocate for gender equality. More recently, the campaign’s momentum plateaued, with limited new engagement on HeForShe’s website and social channels. Meanwhile, global conversation about gender equality was on the rise thanks to the MeToo movement.

HeForShe tasked our agency with designing and executing a PR campaign that would reignite momentum around the HeForShe movement — rekindling global dialogue and media coverage around HeForShe and gender equality to inspire change. All while generating wide-spread, positive social media engagement, and increasing site traffic to their website and social channels – completely pro-bono.

Our plan also had to navigate a few complicating factors. It had to be globally relevant; cost-free; and compete for media 'air time' focused on other worthy and related causes.

The More Powerful Together campaign was developed with the consideration of three major contextual factors that influenced the development of the campaign.

1) Globally, almost one third of companies have no women in senior management roles and less than 4 per cent of CEOs are women. The overt discriminatory attitudes largely eliminated in the ranks, seemed alive and well in leadership circles.

2) The latest Global Gender Gap report published by the World Economic Forum reported an estimation that the gender gap will still take more than 100 years to close.

3) The virality of the MeToo movement was shedding necessary light on gender experiences in the workplace and beyond. But it did come with some unintended consequences that research showed was affecting relations between and women in the workplace.

The campaign was thus designed to be aggressively bold while taking a positive tone that would be compelling and inclusive.

Our first challenge was to develop a plan to motivate men to join millions of existing HeForShe allies in supporting women in the MeToo era, as insights from survey research from Pew Research and LeanIn.Org, showed growing alienation of women in the workplace. Male executives admitted recent focus on sexual harassment made them fear close interactions with women such as mentoring or socializing.

We set to create a global-reaching campaign that inspired men to do the opposite - advocate for women rather than alienating them. We needed a compelling idea that brought to life the contributions of women to society and the consequences of excluding them. This led us to our core insight: 'Half the world’s power is lost when women are excluded,’ and our big idea to use some of the world’s most iconic buildings (often male-run) to make the intangible issue of gender equality more real.

Our strategy was to create a show-stopping, socially-shareable, global visual to telegraph the idea that societies are half as powerful if women are excluded or treated unequally, driving the message that equal inclusion of women benefits all. This led to the creation of the magnetic idea and campaign, More Powerful Together.

To launch the campaign, we used the spotlight moment to make a big splash in a crowded space during the UN General Assembly. We partnered with iconic landmarks around the world to stand in solidarity with the campaign by powering down half their exterior lights on a single day to demonstrate the impact of excluding women.

To give life and voice to the campaign, we partnered with celebrity Mark Consuelos, a husband, father and outspoken advocate for gender equality. His story and voice resonated with men and women in our target demographic.

We had two tentpole moments, #MorePowerfulTogether building lightings (September 24) and HeForShe’s annual IMPACT Summit (September 26). Consumer and pop-culture media outreach focused on #MorePowerfulTogether, offering interviews with Mark Consuelos. Outreach to business, policy, gender, newswires, etc., focused on the HeForShe IMPACT event, offering UN spokespeople to media.

Twenty-five buildings and landmarks participated in #MorePowerfulTogether across eight countries. Most were mentioned in our communications materials, but many also made separate announcements and shared the campaign across social.

Mark Consuelos launched #MorePowerfulTogether at an Empire State Building lighting ceremony on 9/24 with a speech, media interviews, photo opportunities, and by posting prepared social content before and after launch.

Our agency team also built toolkits with sample social posts, selfie signs, digital assets (gifs and mocked up building images) for pro-bono social influencers, buildings, other FH offices, advocates, and anyone else who expressed interest.

Our work led to a surge of 30,000 pledged commitments and a nearly 500% increase in website traffic event week. It garnered over 424 million earned media impressions, a 41% increase over the previous year, with nearly 200 articles across 159 outlets, in 13 countries and languages. It also secured over 145 million social media impressions. #HeForShe trended nationally on Twitter. Sentiment was 100% positive/neutral with 100% pull-through of at least one key message. Several Heads of State supported HeForShe’s mission in dialogues and through social and/or traditional media. U.S. state government offices stood in solidarity, powering down half the lights of their capitols, while the state of Minnesota declared September 24, “HeForShe Day.” Queen Rania of Jordan’s summit speech and Burj Khalifa’s participation in the lighting event in Dubai shed a light on the Arab world; it became a leading region for foreign media coverage for HeForShe.