Client: Meet and Code, in partnership with SAP, Amazon and TechSoup Europe
Period: 2021 onwards
Approach: Messaging and brand architecture, content, social media, media relations, events, partner enablement
The Challenge
By 2021, Europe’s largest youth digital skills initiative was running in 35 countries and approaching its fifth anniversary. The events were real and the reach was real, but the initiative had no shared language for what it was for.
Each market described the mission in its own words, which meant coverage in one country did nothing for the programme as a whole, and the partners funding the work were reading 35 different versions of it. The complication was structural. The organisations delivering the events were independent NPOs who did not report to the initiative, so no narrative could simply be issued from the centre. It had to be built in a way that 35 countries would choose to adopt.
The Hook
A story nobody is obliged to use has to be better than the one they are already telling. Otherwise it will be ignored politely and permanently.
So the first deliverable was a communications blueprint rather than a campaign. HLS set the core mission around empowering Europe’s future workforce and closing the digital divide through partnership and inclusion, then built the theme that would carry it across every market, “Empowering Youth for Careers of the Future”, running under #DigitalSkills4All.
That gave 35 countries one frame to work inside while leaving the local stories intact. It also gave the initiative something to say that went beyond counting events, which mattered to funders who could already see the numbers and wanted to know what they meant.
The Line
Content was the spine. Blogs and newsletters ran continuously, anchored each year by the EU Impact Report, which became the document partners and funders used to understand what the initiative had achieved.
Social media ran across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, covering content planning, design, daily community management and stakeholder responses, with campaign bursts around key moments.
Two owned properties were conceptualised and run end to end. The Ambassador Search and the Meet and Code Awards each needed scripting, partner briefs, trophies, winner communications and amplification, and both gave the press something with a name and a face rather than a programme update.
Media relationships were built and held across Europe, supported by press kits and coordinated with the partner brands, the participating NPOs and influencers.
Partner enablement did the heaviest lifting, and it is where the strategy either worked or did not. Rather than centralise the storytelling, HLS equipped local NPOs with Communications Toolkits and ran a communications webinar, so the organisations actually delivering the events could tell their own stories to the right standard in their own markets. Video carried what data could not, through the awards ceremony film and annual impact videos built on participant stories.
The Sinker
330,000 young people reached by the initiative since 2021, 32,000 of them in 2024.
- 22 million combined press audience
- 90 media clippings across Europe
- Thousands of organic followers added across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn
- A standing community of NPOs, partners and participants across 35 markets
- Communications architecture built in 2021 still carrying the story today
What you do is stop trying to control the story and start making one worth adopting. Meet and Code did not need 35 markets to say the same words. It needed them to make the same argument, so that a clipping in Poland and a clipping in Portugal both built the same case for funders and partners. The initiative holds its position as Europe’s leading youth digital skills programme, with a 22 million press audience behind it and a community across 35 markets that did not exist as a single entity before. The most commercially useful outcome is the least visible one. The architecture was built once in 2021 and is still running, which means every year since has started from a position rather than a blank page.
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