Girl Up movement continues to drive gender equality and social impact

The community challenge

In 2020, young people embraced digital technologies more than ever to advocate and raise awareness. During this time—and thanks in part to implementing a strategy framework earlier that year—Girl Up’s online community experienced a considerable increase in memberships.

The organization recognized that its previous community management platform lacked the robust capabilities that would allow it to facilitate connections, encourage meaningful exchanges, and cultivate a sense of belonging at scale. Consequently, Girl Up decided to partner with Hivebrite to create a brand new community experience to better support new and existing members to drive positive impact.

The community is designed to elevate voices and drive positive change. Members worldwide can connect to learn more about gender equality and get involved with the movement by organizing and participating in events, sharing ideas, and more. Members can search and connect with others locally and globally using the member directory, which displays members’ locations on an interactive map.

The Hivebrite solution

Hivebrite’s Group Module enables clubs to function independently within the centralized global community. Every club offers hyper-targeted content about gender-related issues and supports group leaders and members to create positive social change in their community. Group leaders can post news, organize events, share resources, and create forum discussions specific to their club.

Members can find local clubs and see what events and activities they’ve organized—helping to grow local clubs, create coalitions between different clubs, and improve event turnouts. All visual elements in the community—from typology to colors—match Girl Up’s visual identity to reinforce the organization’s branding and create a consistent experience across all its channels.

During the implementation phase, the team surveyed community members to collect feedback on their sign-up experiences. Thanks to these insights, the community built a seamless and targeted journey to encourage joining the community and immediate engagement.

Non-members can view blog articles and past events to encourage them to join. Signing up and getting involved with the community is fast and personalized. New members are recommended starting points in the community based on their interests. Girl Up is also focused on enhancing the community as a multilingual platform to ensure that language is not a barrier to joining.

With Hivebrite, Girl Up can also offer its members a fully branded mobile application available in both the App Store and Google Play. The mobile app version of our community has been instrumental in improving member accessibility given the majority access the platform from a mobile device. As a result of its strategic approach, within six months of its launch with Hivebrite, Girl Up grew membership by 1,592% and increased member activity by 3,438%.

The team organizes monthly club-based challenges to encourage members worldwide to share the social impact-driven content and events they have built.

”We know that local steps can have a global impact. Channels outside of the community such as social media are also used to broadcast our initiatives— maximizing reach and exposure of activities and inspiring more people to join the movement,” said Karina Sharma, Communications & Digital Media Coordinator at Girl Up, United Nations Foundation.

The outcome

The Girl Up Community Engagement team is laser-focused on its community strategy to facilitate connection and communication to elevate voices and support members to drive change. The team puts its members—their needs and feedback—at the center of its strategy to drive growth and impact. ”Within the community, there is a dedicated area for members to submit a report to tell Girl Up HQ about the incredible things they have been doing to advance gender equality and track progress,” said Tess.

By seeing what topics members are interested in, the team can identify growth opportunities. ”As Girl Up’s community continues to grow and evolve, we are serene with the knowledge that Hivebrite’s community engagement platform will continue to support our work by connecting members with each other and essential resources to create potentially viral content, make voices heard, spur collective action, and fight inequalities,” said Tess.