Visa special project for International Women's Month

One of the main goals of the Visa brand is to be relevant to solving important social problems, to talk about them more and louder. On March 8, 2024, Visa decided to become a mouthpiece for women to remind people of the true essence of this day — the fight for women's rights.

Our main goal was to create a powerful communication for Visa's social media for International Women's Month. One that would clearly express an important idea: "A woman can be different."

Visa is always about people. It is important for the brand to participate in solving important social issues. Charitable collaborations with Courage, Bolt and WOG as part of the “Nebaduzhi” initiative. Supporting young talents in various fields — from design to music. All this is just a part of the initiatives in which Visa participates. One of the largest regular projects of the brand is the women's business accelerator “Vidvazhna” as part of She’s Next Empowered by Visa. Thanks to it, hundreds of businesswomen were able to build their own successful business. Supporting women is important for Visa all 365 days a year, but International Women’s Month is a great opportunity to convey the brand’s values ​​to the audience.

“It is not that we could not ignore such an important date as March 8 — we set ourselves the goal of doing something special: inspiring, meaningful and real! Something that could unite women from different fields across the country in the fact that they themselves have the right to decide who they are. Motivate them to reject stereotypes and fear, and just be themselves. And also, remind people of the true meaning of this date, because it is often still misinterpreted as a day of beauty, spring and tulips,” — Natalka Dumnych, SMM Head.

In the seemingly progressive year of 2024, women still face certain stereotypes, prejudices, and limitations: “This is a man’s job,” “This skirt is too short, and this one, on the contrary, adds age to you,” “This is not a matter for women to understand,” “We wish you to find true female happiness next to your man!” Visa is convinced that women can achieve what they want and do what they dream of. A strong businesswoman, a gentle mother and wife, a combination of these roles or creating their own — a woman chooses for herself. That’s how the idea was born: to organize and film mini-interviews with successful representatives of various fields. We chose this format because we wanted to create a sense of a personal conversation with women who shared their experiences. To make it more lively and emotionally colored. And who can tell better than the women themselves who went through all this: faced restrictions, heard stereotypical phrases familiar to many?

The main heroines of our videos were:

Svitlana Chyrva
Vice President, Regional Manager of Visa in Ukraine and Moldova.

Inna Hordieieva
Film critic, member of the Union of Film Critics of Ukraine.

Natalia Haripova
Stand-up comedian, screenwriter, producer.

Anna Strakhovska
Head of Diya.Business in Bucha and head of the NGO "BeCity".

We chose representatives of different spheres to demonstrate the power of women: it doesn’t matter if she is an entrepreneur, a woman from the financial sphere, or from the cultural sphere — each one can face certain factors and limitations. However, if she understands what she wants, she will be able to achieve her goals and dreams. 


“We wanted this to be a message from one woman to another. Because the stories that we revealed are, on the one hand, cases of a specific woman, and on the other, something that is familiar to almost everyone. And we wanted the story of a woman who coped with this — sincere, truthful, frank — to inspire women who, perhaps, are just now facing something similar. They can see that it is not critical. You have your circle of women, women power, who can support you.” — Maryna Mikieladze, SMM Team Lead.


The preparation time was quite limited, so we did everything we could in parallel: SMM and account teams combined all their best skills for the most coordinated work.


Considering that we were creating a video specifically for Instagram, where no one would watch hour-long podcasts, the team was faced with the task of fitting all the main insights into 90 seconds. Therefore, it was decided to conduct a preliminary interview with each of the heroines. We asked them all the same questions that you see in the video, found the most interesting insights and recorded them. And during the filming, they asked them to repeat the same thing, but on camera. Thus, we did not rewrite the text, which creates this sincerity and ease, but recorded the quotes said in order to conduct the filming more quickly and organizedly. After all, the filming process was quite intensive: only 2 days to film each of the heroines. It was a challenge for us to organize everything properly to fit the participants' schedules. But, as always in the Grape team, the challenge was accepted and passed with flying colors. In the end, we got exactly the result we needed.

The feedback was worth all the effort. In particular, from the female audience, which was essentially the main target audience of this special project. People actively commented and reposted, asked the participants questions about their stories. There was a lot of positive feedback. In numbers: the posts showed up to +50% higher ERR than the average values ​​​​in this quarter. And the number of comments increased by more than 600%, compared to the average content indicator in this quarter. And most importantly, in these comments, people left very warm feedback about the heroines' stories and how inspiring and motivating they are. We felt that the message that was laid out at the beginning worked. It came out sincere, and the audience felt it.