As an international charity organisation, we strive to advance gender equality by empowering girls across the world. We do this through our core values of Equality, Commitment, Empowerment and Progress.

To inspire girls worldwide, we connect them with a diverse range of female role models from all backgrounds, professions and countries. Research from The Female Lead shows that 93% of girls felt they had higher personal and career aspirations after following inspirational women on social media. (Disrupting the Feed, 2019).

The overall objective of our campaign was to increase the presence of female role models on social media so that girls have access to a range of women who can help empower them to reach their full potential and raise their aspirations. We also aimed to spread awareness on our global charity to reach more countries and people not yet aware of the impactful that work we do.

Improving the future for girls improves everyone’s future, but girls are still affected by a chronic lack of confidence and ingrained gender stereotypes. Girls experience a 30% drop in confidence between the ages of 8-14, which can limit their educational and career choices.

Role models can be instrumental in breaking down stereotypes and addressing the confidence gap which teenage girls often experience. Two thirds of girls across the world state that talking to women role models inspired them to consider a broader range of career options. In this context, the importance of raising visibility and access to a range of diverse women role models is integral to changing the future for girls all over the world.

In today's world, social media is widely used by the majority of teens across the globe. A 2018 Pew Research Centre survey of 750 13-to-17 year-olds found that 97% use a social media platform. The global pandemic undoubtedly changed social media habits and in recognising that user growth was dramatically increasing, as well as the negative impact of covid-19 halting the progress of gender equality (UN Sustainability Goal 5), the pandemic became one of the factors behind the idea of running this digital campaign.

To mark International Day of the Girl, we asked women to post pictures of themselves as a girl on social media, share their ambitions at that age and advice they would give their younger selves. Women from all walks of life shared #ThisLittleGirlIsMe stories and the campaign went viral across the globe for girls to discover inspiring journeys, as they set off on their own path. The campaign was to be huge drive for women's self reflection and self-celebration to inspire aspirations for the next generation.

Ana Botin would tell her younger self to learn from mistakes you make. Dr Samantha Batt-Rawden advises not to let anyone ever tell you your dreams are out of reach. Martina Navratilova would tell her younger self that it’s okay to ask for help and if Billie Jean King could go back in time, she’d tell herself to “dream big and go for it."

We gathered a number of research statistics from a variety of sources including:

The Female Lead Research, 2020

The Confidence Code For Girls, Ypulse, 2018

Girls’ Attitudes Survey, 2020

The results from each research source clearly demonstrate that young girls lack awareness of the magnitude of possibilities they have in life and that real life role models play a critical role in breaking down gender stereotypes.

Our target audience of the campaign ranged from ‘Role models’ who were women worldwide aged 24+ and teens/young adults who were women/girls worldwide aged 13-23.

We seeded the idea amongst well known, high profile women to kickstart the campaign on Instagram and to build momentum. It then spread quickly and widely online with many of the stories featuring women overcoming adversity, across a variety of topics from wellbeing to careers. LinkedIn stated the campaign 'created the most buzz in the history of the platform.'

The implementation phase involved re-posting and creating ‘then and now’ posts of the participants to ensure they could be identified easily as well as curating engaging, static, animated and video content to encourage participation with the campaign and sharing stories with the hashtag #ThisLittleGirlIsMe.

The campaign kicked off on 13th September and the last official day of the campaign was on 11th October 2021 to mark and celebrate International Day of the Girl, a key day that is a core focus for our organisation each year.

Regarding the placement of the campaign, we used organic social media through user generated content.

As a campaign that has never been done before, it managed to reach a global scale having a huge presence across our network of 23 country teams at the time, spanning Latin America, United States, Europe, Middle East & North Africa and Asia Pacific regions.

The impact of the campaign certainly surpassed our targets. Our social media in particular had huge success in growing our following from 7K to 10.5K throughout the campaign. We reached 20.2M Instagram accounts, made 2.7M impressions across LinkedIn and Instagram and had an Instagram engagement rate of 80%.

As a non-profit organisation, we rely on funding from partner organisations and with the exposure of our campaign online, particularly on LinkedIn, we saw heightened engagement and interest from global organisations keen to get involved in the work we do to empower girls worldwide. Google and BNY Mellon Investment Banking are among the key global organisations that became aware of our organisation through the #ThisLittleGirlIsMe campaign. Since then, BNY Mellon have signed a global partnership contract to provide funding and to also deliver financial literacy workshops to empower the girls we work with across the world to consider a career in finance.