Campaign · Flatiron School

Tech Girl Summer

A Flatiron School campaign to get more women into tech

Role

Creative Director

Scope

Campaign strategy, creative, influencer program

Timeline

Summer 2021, 10 weeks

Execution

In-house, no agency

Tech Girl Summer key art
$250K
generated on a $52K budget, nearly a 5x return
230
scholarship applications driven
$223
cost per acquisition on a $17K product
#1
event of the quarter, lowest budget

The challenge

A scholarship built to close the gender gap, and not enough people applying.

Flatiron School had created the Women Take Tech Scholarship to get more women into tech. What it needed was applicants: women, roughly 25 to 35, quietly wondering whether a career in tech was for them. Tech has a real gender gap, and a standard ad was never going to move someone to change their entire career. This had to feel like an invitation, not a banner.

Gender gap message ads

The big idea

Make getting into tech the best thing you could do with your summer.

Tech Girl Summer took the joy and confidence of the season and pointed it straight at a real decision. Bright, warm, and unapologetically fun, a whole visual world of pool floats, sunglasses, and "apply while it's hot," wrapped around a serious message about closing the gender gap. Serious cause, summer energy. The hashtag did the rest.

TechGirlSummer lockups

The campaign

The engine was people, not ad spend.

I built an influencer program of around twenty women in tech and Flatiron alumni across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts, each telling her own real story of switching into tech, each with a trackable link straight to the scholarship. Around them I layered Flatiron's own organic social, email, paid ads, and a live "Women Talk Tech" panel, all hitting the same beat for ten weeks.

Everyone worked from one brief and one creative kit, so twenty different voices still added up to one campaign.

Influencer roster phase 1
Influencer roster phase 2

The creative

Authentic to each creator, unmistakably one campaign.

Every influencer got the brand, the lockups, the guardrails, and the call to action, then made it their own. The result felt like a movement instead of an ad buy: reels, stories, carousels, and posts, in each creator's real voice, all leading to the same place.

Campaign content in market
Creator content examples

What made it work

An invitation, not an ad

People do not change careers because of a banner. They change because someone who looks like them made it feel possible. The creators were the message.

One brief, twenty voices

Authentic-to-each-creator and on-brand are not opposites. A clear brief and a tight kit let twenty people sound like themselves and like one campaign.

A big result on a small budget

$250K on $52K did not come from spend. It came from a strong idea, the right people, and trackable links that proved exactly what worked.

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