Case Study
The Largest CEO-Driven Business Commitment to Improving D&I in the Workplace
PWC’s CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion
The Challenge
PwC’s CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™ is the largest CEO-driven business commitment to advance diversity and inclusion within the workplace. This commitment is driven by a realization that addressing diversity and inclusion is not a competitive issue, but a societal issue. Recognizing that change starts at the executive level, more than 2,000 CEOs of the world’s leading companies and business organizations have leveraged their individual and collective voices to advance D&I in the workplace.
For five years, Fenton has served as the coalition’s strategic communications partner, helping to drive momentum and awareness for this initiative and inspiring business leaders to act. Year after year, Fenton has identified new ideas and angles to position CEO Action and its respective signatories as thought leaders in addressing D&I in the workplace.
Our Approach
Fenton supported CEO Action by driving top-tier national media interest surrounding the coalition’s major initiatives, including its annual Closed-Door Session for signatories, its annual Day of Understanding program, and its CHRO & CDO Virtual Workshop Series, which covered topics including responding to social issues, D&I data and transparency, allyship vs. activism, storytelling and stakeholder engagement, and board insights.
Surrounding each of these key moments, Fenton developed engaging pitch angles for signatory spokespeople, arranged interviews with journalists across top-tier press and relevant trade publications, and developed op-eds to reach CEO Action’s target audiences of CEOs, CHRO, and CDO leaders.
Additionally, throughout the year, Fenton monitored the D&I media landscape daily and leveraged emerging themes in proactive pitching – to insert CEO Action leaders into conversations covering a wide range of workplace D&I topics such as race, unconscious bias, gender strategies, disability initiatives, LGBT equity and more.
In 2021, we expanded our scope to complement our proactive earned media strategy with an ongoing organic social media strategy, including content creation, and designing and implementing a paid media strategy around key moments.
Impact
Over the course of the partnership, Fenton has secured strong media coverage in top-tier national print and online media, including Bloomberg TV, Business Insider, Cheddar, CNBC, Essence, Forbes, Fortune, MarketWatch, PBS, SHRM, The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! Finance, and more, garnering over 1.1B impressions to date. Fenton leveraged signatory CEOs, PwC’s Chairman Tim Ryan and Chief Purpose & Inclusion Officer Shannon Schuyler as spokespeople and positioned them as thought leaders advancing DEI in the workplace.
Amplifying our earned media coverage, we deployed a learn-and-optimize approach to organic and paid social media, uplifting Day of Understanding, the fourth anniversary of CEO Action, the Annual Closed-Door Session, and the Workshop Series, among others. In 2021, these efforts garnered over 1.5M impressions, 163K clicks to event pages, the homepage, and the pledge page and over 4K new followers.
