National Intern Day. A campaign to celebrate the country's least appreciated employees - interns.
Judges: Watch our launch video below.
WayUp, the leading job discovery platform for U.S. college students and recent graduates, matches more than 3.8 million candidates with jobs and internships at thousands of top companies nationwide.
To generate brand awareness and recognize the vital contributions that interns deliver to their respective organizations, WayUp decided to create a dedicated day called National Intern Day on the fourth Thursday of July. The overwhelming response, by interns and organizations alike, empowered this new holiday to become the most engaged topic globally on Twitter on July 27th, 2017.
Strategy —
Beyond all expectations, the WayUp team was able to generate global awareness and engagement by orchestrating an omnichannel campaign with minimal resources and paid reach to two distinct audiences (interns and companies). This included a contest called the Intern Awards to find the country’s best interns and intern programs, multiple video series about current and former interns, dozens of articles of advice for employers and interns, and “intern celebration kits” filled with custom swag and banners that were shipped to offices across the nation.
All Projects
Virality —
#NationalInternDay became the #1 trending topic in the world on Twitter, and the keyword “national intern day” was used 31,034 times and reached over 261,863,266 people.
Thousands of companies and organizations across the nation celebrated through in-office pizza parties, ice-cream sundae bars, sporting events, CEO AMAs, scavenger hunts, and more. Organizations including the ACLU, the Chicago Cubs, PwC, NASA, MTV, NASCAR, Pixar, HP, Pokemon, and more were some of the first to get involved, triggering others to celebrate throughout the day. Dozens of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle also participated in the celebrations. Three of the biggest broadcast morning shows, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and CBS This Morning, gave their interns shout outs on air. Even celebrity interns, like Super Bowl Champion and Green Bay Packers’ Safety Ha Ha Clinton-Dix, took to social media to celebrate.
We kicked off the celebration on the Today Show.
Brand Awareness —
National Intern Day also drove incredible brand awareness back to WayUp. On WayUp, businesses purchase subscription packages in order to reach, recruit and engage with students and recent grads. Because National Intern Day became so widespread, the buzz around it created real, genuine interest from over 1,100 businesses interested in hiring through WayUp’s platform.
In addition to driving interest from businesses, all of the social media and press buzz around National Intern Day also drove thousands of students and recent grads to learn more about WayUp too. The WayUp team was able to secure 58 featured press hits in top media outlets including the Today Show, Forbes, CNBC, and Cheddar TV. On July 27th, WayUp’s social media channels were flooded with new visitors, and experienced their average number of monthly profile visits in one single day.
The buzz around National Intern Day continued into August...
Impact —
In one day, WayUp was able to dispel the stereotype that internships are exclusively about fetching coffee and making copies. National Intern Day created a meaningful moment of expression for the importance of interns and the programs they represent in turn. In a world with so much negativity, National Intern Day was a true breath of fresh air in the news cycle that day.
By creating National Intern Day, WayUp inspired thousands of employers across multiple industries - tech, retail, consumer goods, non-profit, finance, and more - to give their interns the recognition and respect that they deserve. In addition, WayUp disrupted the benchmark by which internship programs measure themselves by creating the first ever “top 100 internships” list based on all of the data collected from interns over the course of the campaign.
National Intern Day allowed WayUp to connect with and grow its community of students, recent graduates, and employers but also helped to establish WayUp as a national expert on interns, and the go-to resource for anything and everything internship-related.