The Muse, a career-building website, was looking to gain recognition and awareness. To help women ask for a raise, The Muse turned Cindy Gallop, one of the world’s fiercest female leaders and equal pay advocates, into a chatbot. Backed by data and supported with sass, women could use the tool to compare salaries, get answers, and build their case — getting them one step closer to closing the gender pay gap while drawing awareness and inspiring action.
Objective and Context:
Women do just as much as men do in the workplace, but still make less than men on average. Overall, in the U.S., white women make 80 cents for every dollar a white man makes, while Latina and black women make 54 and 63 cents respectively. Looking into ways to fight this situation, The Muse stumbled upon an insight from a study by the Cass Business School, the University of Warwick, and the University of Wisconsin which revealed that women are 25 percent less likely to receive a raise after asking because they often don’t know how to ask, when to ask, and how much to ask for. The brand set out to help women better prepare for this key moment in their careers.
Target Audience:
The Muse’s target audience was young professional women ages 18 to 24. These women are progressive and bold, but still seeking the confidence they need to make the next move in their careers.
Creative Strategy:
To develop a skill, people need more than advice— they need a tool. In partnership with Ladies Get Paid (a career development organization and community for women), Reply.ai (a chatbot-building and management platform), and PayScale (a global salary profile database), The Muse launched the Ask for a Raise Chatbot. The bot is a light-hearted but insightful tool that scales powerful individual conversations and helps professional women around the world build their cases for a raise.
Overall Campaign Execution:
To build the Ask for a Raise Chatbot, The Muse compiled salary information from PayScale, research data from various sources, and real human insights from Ladies Get Paid. All this data made it possible for women to compare their salary with other professionals in their own city, learn when the best day to ask for a raise was, and get answers to their confidence concerns with cold hard data (e.g., 75 percent of people who ask get some kind of pay bump).
Mobile Execution:
The tool needed to be on an accessible platform with a global reach if it was going to deliver one-on-one conversations that could guide women in their personal path to develop their skills. Facebook Messenger was the perfect platform to get mobile reach as well as the required privacy.
With no media spend behind it, the tool has seen over 100,000 users, 86 percent of them female (ages 18 to 44), with conversations lasting an average of 1 minute 43 seconds. The campaign was immensely well received and the myriad of tweets and posts from women referencing the chat bot on social media made it a worthwhile endeavor for the brand.
