How do we support a legacy fellowship program’s quest for a more diverse and equitable application process?

Challenge

For nearly a century, the Henry Luce Foundation has been committed to deepening cultural understanding as a means to advance democracy and justice. Their Luce Scholars Program is an immersive and exploratory program where emerging US leaders with diverse backgrounds and interests spend a year living and working in Asia. Historically, the program had worked with a select number of elite higher education institutions to identify scholars. However, they were transitioning to a more open and equitable application that allowed anyone between the ages of 18 and 34 to apply and needed dedicated support reaching a new and expanded audience of graduating students and young professionals.

KMSG supported the marketing rollout for the 2022 and 2023 cohorts.

Henry Luce asked KMSG to support with:

  • Creating an engaging social media marketing campaign to announce their Luce Scholar Program in Asia

  • Developing a digital marketing strategy to recruit recent graduates, young adults, and early professionals seeking leadership development opportunities 

  • Ensuring their new audience profile focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEI/B) and curating a targeted list of higher education institutions and leaders with an emphasis on historically-underserved student populations

  • Establishing benchmarks based on in depth reporting of campaign success, lessons, and recommendations to drive future digital marketing strategy

Context

Action & Impact

2023 Campaign :

  • Utilizing paid ad campaigns on Instagram and LinkedIn, we garnered over 360,000 unique impressions (for a total of 989,960 impressions) and over 4,500 link clicks leading to applications for Luce Scholars Program (LSP).

  • Of the more than 333,000 unique Instagram accounts reached, the age and gender breakdown was as follows: 44.6% Male 25-34; 28.6% Female 25-34; 13% Female 18-24; 13.1% Male 18-24; and 0.7% Other.

  • This campaign led to 4,808 unique visits from paid and organic social posts of an overall total of 19,660 unique page visits. That means that 24.45%, or nearly 1 in 4, of all visits to the LSP page came from our ads.

  • To compare these results with the 2022 campaign (which was already successful at referring new applicants from more diverse communities), we had 707 unique visitors from social of a total of 12,741 total unique page visits. For 2022, 5.5% of link clicks to the page came from our ads.

    • Performance improved year-over-year by more than 4.5X.

Social Ads & Imagery

Top Performing LinkedIn Ads

Top Performing Instagram Ads

Instagram Grids

Additional Ad Imagery

Action & Impact

2022 Campaign :

  • Developed and disseminated 3 waves of ad campaigns across all social media platforms that specifically targeted higher education audiences and reached over 730,000 people (LinkedIn: ~101,000; Instagram: ~274,000; and Twitter: ~363,000) and cultivated over 43,000 meaningful engagements (and nearly 1,500 link clicks on the application portal)

  • Successfully engaged leaders ranging from Student Life Directors, Alumni Advisors, Professors, and College Deans who amplified the LSP opportunity to their networks.

Social Ads & Imagery

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