Raising opportunities for everyone

Inspiring young people

With over 700 routes and 2,500 pilots, easyJet is one of the most recognisable names in air travel. But despite this, they were struggling to find and attract the qualified talent they needed.

This challenge was made all the more difficult by an industry-wide lack of female pilots — with females accounting for only 4% of pilots worldwide.

It was clear that this wasn’t a problem that could be solved through experienced hires. We needed a strategy to engage, inspire and influence the next generation of pilots – primarily Year 9, 11 and 13 students at critical stages of their early career decision-making.

Our brief from easyJet

easyJet wanted to be positioned as ‘the’ go-to source of information for how to become a commercial pilot. Something that would be key to achieving their ambitious target of having a 20% female pilot workforce by 2020 (known as the Amy Johnson Initiative).

To support this they needed a website that:

• would provide a clear overview of a pilot’s role, dispell myths, and give all the information you’d need to embark on the journey
• would promote the role of a pilot and sell all the reasons why it’s an excellent career choice
• would be easy to update with fresh and relevant information and visuals
• would be highly inclusive to support easyJet’s aims of addressing gender imbalance across the aviation industry
• could be easily updated with fresh and relevant information and visuals.

One more thing; to make the project slightly more challenging, it was decided that to achieve maximum impact we’d launch the site on International Women’s Day – giving us just two weeks from brief to deadline.

We were keen to take on the challenge! A challenge we more than rose to.

First we did our groundwork

We knew it was vital to get the foundations right and so we performed interviews with senior stakeholders, cadets and cadet training partners, to gather personal stories to form highly engaging and relevant content.

We also mapped the user journey to make sure the site delivered the very best possible experience.

And we used SEO research to inform content that’d keep it at the top of relevant searches.

Building the site

We left nothing to chance.

We developed well-researched, highly detailed wireframes for the build. We made sure that every page had a clear focus, was simple and extremely engaging, with lots of rich content ranging from stories and video profiles to clips from ITV’s ‘Inside the Cockpit’.

A platform for diversity

We used the website to champion diversity in a variety of ways. We gave current female pilots the chance to tell their stories through a collection of blogs and videos. Hearing about the achievements of people like Kate (easyJet’s youngest ever Captain at 26) provides realistic inspiration for young viewers.

We also gave the Amy Johnson Initiative its own space. This initiative holds real importance to easyJet. They believe that no other airline is doing more to encourage women to become pilots, so it was important to tell this story on the website.

easyJet is working hard to drive positive change across the industry and challenge societal perceptions that being a pilot is a male job. They recently partnered with the Girl Guides to launch a new ‘Aviation’ badge and inspire young minds to consider becoming a pilot. Hosting blogs on the website gives easyJet a way to showcase great work like this.

A new generation

As engaging with young people was crucial to our goals, we made sure that all our information was targeted to young people in an inclusive and relevant way. And that accessing information was fun, simple and easy.

This helped us show that a career in aviation is accessible and one to aspire to.

Taking off on International Women’s Day

Given easyJet’s ongoing commitment to tackling gender in equality in the aviation industry, there really was no better day to launch the new site. So, we pulled out all the stops to get everything ready for one of the biggest days in the gender diversity calendar.

But we didn’t stop there. We supported the launch with a heavyweight social media campaign to showcase the stories of our ambassadors through inspiring imagery and video content

The site’s gone further than we’d expected

easyJet have used our site for their wider PR and diversity activities.

Their high-profile ‘Catch up if you can’ campaign, which recast the Leonardo DiCaprio pilot scene from Catch Me If You Can with employees’ kids, drove people to our site.

Still getting results two years later

The website has established itself as a key source of information and is a widely recognised resource for anyone looking to become a pilot. It’s achieved:

• Over 222,000 users. An impressive reach that shows how it’s become a key source of info for many.
• Close to 300,000 sessions. People are returning to the website for more, or maybe to recap on something they’ve seen.
• 31% female visitors. This is a 4% increase from the pilot section of the main site.
• 61,000 to partner sites. This is helping budding cadets take the first steps in their journey to becoming a pilot.
• 2 minutes. This shows our audience is engaged by our content and are encouraged to find out more.
• Over 500,000 page views through to 3rd party training sites – a whopping 22% of all users.

And, we’re confident the numbers will climb even higher.