Situation
Techstars Startup Week Detroit is a week-long, free entrepreneurship festival that provides startup founders and aspiring entrepreneurs with resources and support. In order to fuel Detroit’s growing startup ecosystem, the event needed to motivate entrepreneurs of every type and stage to attend and engage.
Strategy
Detroit’s startup scene is diverse so the stories we told had to be diverse as well. As the marketing and communication lead, the Siren team activated a fully integrated plan to tell the stories that would resonate with entrepreneurs and corporate sponsors alike. We:
- Showcased Detroit’s diverse founder community through storytelling over social media, podcast interviews and email marketing
- Secured extensive media coverage to drive traffic back to Startup Week’s website and social channels
- Communicated with local neighborhood associations to encourage community business owners to attend
Results
- A wildly successful event with 11,000+ attendees in a single year
- 53% of attendees were women and 45% were Black, making Detroit one of the most diverse Startup Week events nationwide
- We reached 15.6M people through 265 media placements