Making the Difference careers campaign has flying start

One of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s most important roles is inspiring the next generation of chemical scientists. Members and staff alike love to share their passion for chemistry so that the pupils of today become the chemists of tomorrow.

In January, we launched an exciting new campaign called ‘Chemistry: Making the difference’, with the goal of inspiring teenagers to study chemistry and pursue careers in the chemical sciences. It is based around a series of videos and careers profiles showing the wide range of possibilities available to people who have studied chemistry.

We developed it to engage the Generation Z audience – a demographic that is highly motivated by the issues facing the world, and more determined than ever to impact on them. They are ambitious for a career that is driven by a cause, wanting to make a difference to the world in which they live – locally and globally.

In three months since its launch, the campaign has got off to a flying start: we know from insights and digital measurement that lots of the right people are watching the videos and accessing the website.

Design led by research

The campaign began by asking questions: what kinds of messages and stories will the target audience – teenagers – find interesting and inspiring? What kind of media should we use to reach them? And how will we know if we’ve chosen these correctly? Working with a specialist agency, we researched teenagers’ preferences and behaviours.

We discovered that this generation of teenagers is especially interested in going on to a career that makes a real difference in the world – and particularly helping to solve the global challenges we face today, like sustainable energy, water and food, and climate change. We know that chemistry will be at the heart of the solutions to these challenges, so we knew we could make a clear and attractive link between the two.

In some ways, today’s teenagers get their information very differently. When we launched Not All Chemists Wear White Coats, a popular campaign with similar aims, Google and Facebook didn’t even exist. Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t even been born. We have a new range of communications channels to reach our next-generation audience – primarily YouTube, Facebook and Instagram – and so we built the campaign mainly around those.

But in other ways, teenagers get information in much the same way as they always have: from their friends, teachers, careers advisers and families. We know we need to target not only the students themselves, but the adults that will influence their decisions. This means thinking more broadly about the channels and messages we use for these important secondary groups.

Reaching the target demographic

In January we launched the campaign, focused on a set of new videos and a refresh of our “A future in chemistry” careers website, with the aim of raising awareness and increasing visits to the website. We used paid-for social media advertising as well as relying on our own profile and networks to get the message out.

It’s clear that so far the campaign has been a brilliant success. Our videos and adverts have appeared more than 20 million times across the social media channels we’re working on. We’ve attracted 50,000 new visitors to “A future in chemistry”, and the YouTube videos alone have had tens of thousands of views in total. Furthermore, we’re able to use the analytics data from these social media channels to determine that the vast majority of those viewers and visitors are aged 13–17: exactly our target demographic. We know we’re reaching the right people.

Expanding the audience

This is only the beginning. We’ve already begun to use the videos, posters and messages from the campaign across a wider range of media, to raise even more awareness.

We recently conducted a survey of young people – of whom a quarter said they are inspired to pursue a career that helps to battle climate change because of the school-age activist Greta Thunberg. Releasing this finding to the press resulted in lots of positive coverage across the web and broadcast media – including across all ITV regional networks – highlighting our new campaign and the benefits that a career in chemistry can bring.

We have even more planned: we want to use the campaign to build more resources specifically for teachers and schools – keep an eye out for more communications about those.

How you can support the campaign

We want as many young people as possible to see these videos and be motivated to pursue a career in chemistry. Please do share the videos on any social media that you use, and also share them directly with any teenagers you know are thinking about their future careers.

We all know it’s vital to inspire the next generation of chemists. We know our new campaign hits the right notes – help us spread the word and support the future of chemistry, young people, and the whole world.

Visit the campaign website