Project Overview

One of the biggest projects at JUST Capital was the Worker Financial Wellness Initiative, a coalition of nonprofits and corporations dedicated to improving the financial lives of their workers by raising wages and benefits.

Launched in 2020, the initiative slowly gained traction, with some of America’s largest companies signing on—including PayPal, Prudential Financial, Verizon, and more. However, growth of the program stalled in 2022, and while there were several reasons for it, one glaring flaw was that our storytelling around the program was awful (click here to see a snapshot of its old landing page).

The program WAS successful, but you’d have no way of knowing that.

To continue to grow the program and show its impact, we needed a more persuasive storytelling campaign. I was brought in to overhaul our narrative and its assets, creating new videos featuring workers whose lives had been positively impacted by the Initiative, an entirely new webpage experience, new case studies, and additional collateral—on top of a new promotional campaign.

Step 1: Getting the Worker Story Videos Right

I worked with our team to hire an external partner to film and edit interviews with employees that were impacted by the Initiative at PayPal, Verizon, Prudential, and Chipotle, creating both 3-min and 1-min versions of each interview, as well as the compilation video you see at the top of this page.

We went back and forth with them for weeks pulling together the final cuts, and in the end the videos turned out tremendously well. They were our best tools in proving the success of the program, and became the linchpin for our new web experience and promotional campaign.

With the videos done, it was time to dramatically rework the structure of the landing page and the overall content experience.

Step 2: Creating Persuasive Copy and Visuals

I wrote the new landing page, sketching out its design, copy, and how the new case studies would be interwoven throughout. The goal was to make it a sleeker, more compelling visual experience that very clearly emphasized our success stories, as well as proof points (news articles about the program, participating partners, etc).

You can check out a snapshot of the new page on the right, and visit it here.

In addition to overhauling the main webpage, we gave each video its own separate, interlinking case study to help with promotion and go deeper into the featured worker and company.

This played heavily into our promotional plan.

Step 3: Building Out Case Studies and Creating Promotional Material for the Companies

When it came to re-promoting the Initiative, each company was given the 3-min and 1-min version of their worker interviews, along with an additional list of quotes from the edited portions of the video that might work for social.

While we encouraged them to promote the Worker Financial Wellness Initiative overall, I gave them the case study pages to ensure that every company had their own “highlight” page. Lastly, I gave them social templates for most platforms (with an emphasis on LinkedIn and Instagram given the audiences we wanted to reach), crafted a joint press release, and worked with our some of our biggest contacts/influencers to get them onboard with the promotion. Lastly, we also created some small flyers that could be used at both our and partner events to bring people up to speed on the program quickly.

Then we officially launched our new storytelling campaign in April 2023.

Results:

The relaunch caused a surge of traffic (an increase of 315% in the first month, and then dropping to double the monthly traffic of the original page throughout the year.) This surge of interest helped us start initial conversations with more companies, and within a year managed to get Avangrid and two other private companies into the program (each of them supported by their own campaign), and helping another 30k workers get wage increases.