Case Study: McDonald’s HACER Foundation

Setting

Since 1985, McDonald’s continues its commitment to support education in the Hispanic-American community through The HACER Foundation—an organization which awards college scholarships to outstanding Latinx high school students.

Role

UX Design Lead and Content Strategist

Skill

User Research ▸ Design Strategy ▸ Content Strategy ▸ UX Design ▸ Front-end Development

insight

Making history with Generation Sí.

Many Latino households raise their children to be dreamers, however when it comes to applying for scholarships many Gen Z students are discouraged by the fear of not succeeding—wondering if applying is even worth their time and energy.

This generation has already shown its potential to change the world—and McDonald’s wants to help ensure that Hispanic students are front and center in the transformation.

That’s why we are challenging college-age Latinos to join a new movement—one that celebrates and accelerates their promise through McDonald’s HACER national scholarships in higher education, in the hope that their impact will be felt for generations to come.

idea

Empower More by giving more.

McDonald’s empowers all Hispanic dreamers to become doers—not just those with a 4.0 GPA. We made this possible by expanding the range of HACER scholarships from 5 to 30 in order to motivate our dreamers to apply.

Our touch points focused on diversity of students as well as scholarships. Creating feel good moments for leaders of tomorrow made student inspiration and mentorship a cornerstone of the 2018 HACER campaign.

Execution

Meeting Them Where They are.

As part of the 360 campaign we partnered with Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Mitú, and Pandora to activate targeted high-impact digital, video and audio content to share that there are more scholarships than ever.

We also partnered with influencers like LeJuan James—with a reach of 5.1M followers—to drive engagement during key campaign tent poles with bilingual social content.

Our shift of the primary target from parents to Gen Z High School Students led to an increase of digital in the media mix, validating a more robust campaign for the future of HACER. Mitú custom content drove lift in McDonald’s “strong commitment to education,” impacting the campaign awareness and improvement of brand perception.

follow-thru Made easy.

Aside from our display, OLV, and social ads, we drove awareness thru every owned media available including McDonald’s homepage slider and “Trending Now” section of the navigation bar.

The overarching measure of success for McDonald’s HACER Scholarship Program was the total number of scholarship applications. This made the HACER web experience a critical inflection point for student follow-thru in their discovery of the HACER foundation and its 30 scholarships.

As the primary pages of this experience, the “Home/About” and “Eligibility and Requirements” pages provided answers to the questions our touch points and paid media raised.

The secondary pages focused on providing practical and emotional value via “Study Guides”. These three digitally-bound booklets provided a collection of resources designed for the generation HACER wishes to empower as well as the parents that empower them.

With Gen Z being our primary audience and findings suggesting mobile being the device of most first impressions, content was organized to meet users needs while they are on the go. More direct and straightforward. Within the mobile experience, certain text and image content modules were truncated for quicker scanning.

McDonald’s knows that this generation has the potential, drive, and ambition for greatness—and we want Hispanic students to not just be a part of it, but be front and center.

Make Tomorrow GOlden.