National Women in Engineering Day - An inaugural national awareness social media campaign
Success achieved
How the Women’s Engineering Society promoted the diverse opportunities available to girls within engineering and ultimately increased the number of women in the profession.
- Website
- http://www.inwed.org.uk
- Project dates
January 2015 - 23 June 2015
Project team
The project is co-ordiante by WES and its small team of staff:
- Dawn Bonfield, President
- Amina Khalid, Campaign Manager
- Cath Heslop, Office Manager
- The WES council
Tools & Systems
- Thunderclap
- Weebly
Introduction
National Women in Engineering Day (NWED) is an inaugural national awareness campaign set by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) that takes place on the 23rd June. The purpose of our campaign is to promote the diverse opportunities available to girls within engineering and ultimately increase the number of women in the profession.
NWED is all about educating girls about the opportunities within engineering through fun and interactive activities hosted by schools and external organisations that are linked together through the hashtag #nwed and promoted via social media. By linking together external organisations, the campaign inspires action from the public both nationally and internationally, allowing them to take ownership of their event and be at the forefront of gender diversity in engineering.
As the founders of NWED, we use this campaign as a way of encouraging the public to get involved in promoting diversity in engineering and through this external involvement, we are successfully able to secure an outstanding response.
The campaign starts in January, and we build up the engagement using social media by bringing awareness to the day and promoting the various mechanisms that we coordinate including, resource packs, competitions and our conference.
Discovery
The charitable aims of the Women’s Engineering Society are to encourage, inspire and support women in engineering. One of the issues facing WES though is funding, and whilst this campaign is a way of raising the profile of the roles of women in engineering, it is also a way of raising the profile of the society as well, and this in turn will allow us to gain more financial support from sponsors and partners. By ensuring that we are able to be financially sustainable we can continue with the outreach work that we are so passionate to promote.
Objectives
The aims of #nwed is to celebrate and bring awareness of the second annual National Women in Engineering Day (NWED) that was set up in 2014 by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) as a way of celebrating the great achievements of women engineers.
A crucial aim of the campaign is to change perceptions within engineering by highlighting the wonderful opportunities available to girls and women within the profession. This would eventually inspire girls to consider a career in engineering and bridge the evident gap between women and engineering, bringing more diversity and equality to the profession.
The main focus of the campaign is to demonstrate that engineering is for everyone by linking together external organization and getting them to post photos of their NWED events via social media with the hashtag #nwed.
Activities
The approach we took to this project was basically a hands off approach as much as possible. We wanted to spread the word but not own the campaign. We wanted other people to own it themselves. This was crucial, as we are such a small team and would have very much limited the size of the campaign if we acted as gatekeepers. In some ways the organisation lost out through the fact that people didn’t necessarily know that it was our campaign, but on the positive side this was absolutely the key to its size and success.
We wanted National Women in Engineering Day to be similar to International Women’s Day, in that everyone celebrates it but nobody owns it – everybody just does whatever they want.
We started working on the campaign in January 2015 and the event took place on 23 June. So for the six months prior to the event we worked fulltime on its organisation. It was quite a huge effort but we had a massive amount of engagement with a great uptake.
We produced a resource pack that was sent out by post and available to download online, and we sent this out to over 800 organisations in the end. It was full of resources and had lots of ideas in for what people could do on the day.
We designed a website to support the event where all of the resources were kept, and where the events were listed, and then we made sure that we listed everything that was going on.
We linked everything with the same hashtag on the day, so that people felt that they were part of a big movement – which they were. We definitely felt that this helped people to engage, as they felt much more engaged because they were part of a successful day.
Social media banner
The day involved anybody and everybody who wanted to engage: schools, companies, Girl Guides, Sea Cadets, individuals, professional institutions, universities – anyone and everyone. We had suggestions and ideas and resources for all of them.
The use of the social media platforms provided a practical call-to-action for external organisations to get involved with, thus strengthening our overall marketing strategy. The platforms that were used to drive this campaign were Twitter and Thunderclap. Twitter allowed us to directly promote the campaign and generate more traffic. The target audience for the campaign were schools, teachers, industry, organisations, engineering institution, and universities, and we interacted with them through social media by employing a range of strategies and techniques.
@nwed1919 #nwed Tweet
Eye-catching Twitter graphics were released on the day, which featured statistics revealing the extremely low percentage of women engineers in the UK and call to action: ‘show the world that engineering is everyone’s game’. We also launched a new initiative specifically for girls to amplify the message of NWED and ensure that girls received continued support post NWED.
We also used the launch of our exclusive NWED video from Born to Engineer featuring our current President at the time, Dawn Bonfield, to engage with the audience on a more personal level. To appeal to a younger demographic, we launched a drawing competition, allowing us to directly establish positive perceptions of engineering early on.
The use of Thunderclap, the first crowd speaking platform, built momentum for the campaign and secured over 600 pledges in the form Tweets and Facebook messages that were released at the same time on the day of the campaign. The pledges from our supporters helped secure a social reach of over 1 million for the hashtag #nwed, allowing us to trend at number one on Twitter. Both Thunderclap and Twitter were managed by the NWED coordinator, Amina Khalid.
Asides from social media, we employed a range of mechanisms to engage with the public for example, our website, via emails, resource packs and promotional materials.
Challenges
The biggest challenge was keeping up with the demand with such a small team and next to no financial resources leading up to and on the day itself. What was also a challenge was having so many events on one day that we were not able to attend more of them. This is a positive though, rather than a negative challenge.
Another difficult part at first was persuading people that they had to do it themselves, and that we were not in a position to ‘help them’. Actually, they were more inclined to ‘help us’ but what we soon realised was that it was crucial that they were not ‘helping us’ but doing it themselves, for themselves. Once we had got over this then people were very happy to own it themselves, and then some of them – but not all – told us what they were doing. Some, to this day, will not realise that the campaign has anything to do with us, but we had to sacrifice recognition for the wider goal of uptake, and that’s precisely what we did.
Achievements
NWED 2015 provided a means of uniting the public for the sake of gender equality and diversity in engineering, making the campaign a winning one. The fact that students came away from the day with a huge sense of positivity towards engineering and STEM subjects highlights that the initial aims of the campaign were met, making it a triumph in the struggle to get more girls and women into engineering in the UK.
The campaign received significant coverage from mainstream media where NWED was reported in over 150 national and local newspaper printed and online articles in the UK and internationally. The official hashtag received over 20,000 posts, resulting in 90 million impressions and a social reach of over 1 million. The hashtag #nwed also trended in top place in the UK and in 5th place worldwide on Twitter.
The campaign was not only acknowledged by the Prime Minister on social media, but also in the UK parliament. A motion was also lodged in the Scottish parliament. Other notable support included presence of HRH Prince Charles at an NWED event organised by Selex ES.
Through the 350 or more schools that were involved with NWED, we were able to reach out to approximately 10,000 children across the country. Our ‘Pushing Boundaries’ NWED video attracted over 3,000 views alone.
The feedback from NWED revealed that the aims of the campaign were met, as the proportion of the public that were exposed to #nwed were more aware of the opportunities available to women, allowing them to be supportive of women engineers.
What would we do differently?
If we started again I think that we might try harder to ensure that people link National Women in Engineering Day to the Women’s Engineering Society. I get told about NWED a lot by people who have no idea that this is our initiative. Whilst this is good on one hand, in that they feel ownership of the event themselves, on the other hand we are not getting the recognition that would help us grow.
Feedback & Testimonials
Feedback from event participants revealed an overwhelming positive response from female students in relation to NWED. One school reported that 50% of their year 7 and 8 students expressed further interest in engineering while over half of students at Glyndwr University NWED event related a possibility of either studying or going into a STEM related subject. The long term impact of NWED was also evident from feedback:
“Before coming I didn’t really know what engineering was like, I thought it was just oil and nails!”
Winchester Science Centre attendee.
Wider impact
#nwed had a significant impact on our organisation as a whole. Towards the end of June, we saw a 200% increase in our Twitter followers for our NWED Twitter account and over 1,000 new followers joined the WES Twitter account @wes1919. The NWED website received over 5,000 unique visitors on the actual day itself.
In terms of WES members, our NWED campaign allowed us to secure around 4 months’ worth of new members within the month of June itself.
The success from our NWED campaign and amazing support from organisations and notable bodies has ensured that NWED is embedded in our annual calendar and will continued to be celebrated in the future to increase diversity and equality in engineering.
