Hacktober, Meta's annual, month-long cyber cybersecurity awareness campaign, was transformed into an entirely virtual, campaign led experience, boosting engagement with the learning event.
Learning campaigns, cybersecurity, microsite, podcasts, animation, gamification
14,686 total page views over one month.
59.3% learner engagement rate.
75,000 users accommodated on the microsite.
Meta needs little introduction. Formerly known as Facebook, this tech giant and regular industry disruptor and innovator is world-renowned, with products including Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and the Metaverse.
Hacktober is Meta’s annual cybersecurity awareness month. Somewhat renowned in the tech community, it typically involves a variety of digital comms and content, as well as in-person events, run throughout October.
In 2022, Hacktober would run from 26th September to 4th November and, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, would be held entirely online. Meta’s challenge for Sponge was to create a new, fully digital, cybersecurity learning campaign, which captured all the same magic as previous Hacktobers.
Beyond the individual successes, all these conclusions also led us to identify our core shared goal for Hacktober 2022:
Regardless of design style, technology or even content, the true key to Hacktober 2022 success would be the creation of a cohesive end-to-end campaign experience – a journey of storytelling, memorable moments and motivation, for Meta’s audience, from the beginning to the end of October 2022.
So, where does one begin when designing an unforgettable month for over 75,000 individuals around the world? By leveraging creativity, to define the emotive and immersive journey that we would take our learners on, and logic, to plan how we would make the journey a reality.
We knew that a unique visual identity for this experience would be critical in making it stand out. But - remember the bigger goal we set for ourselves too...
Our visual style needed to be the conduit for a journey spanning a whole month. It needed to tie together various forms of learning content and had to paint a picture of the various communities, best practices and infrastructures involved in cyber-security at Meta.
With these needs in mind, and inspired by contemporary videogames as planned, the Sponge visual design team created a beautiful illustration style, character set and design language for every element of the Hacktober experience.
This visual style, with familiar characters for the Meta audience (‘Facebook Fox’ and ‘Meta Bot’) and beautiful worlds to discover, encapsulated the exact sense of exploration that we needed the month-long experience to evoke.
The videogame-style side-scrolling worked as a perfect visual device for animations exploring the world of cybersecurity, while all our learning assets became collectibles that were discovered along this path.
While our design team worked their magic, our Experience Consultants and technical team were conjuring up something of their own too.
To make this a real learning journey, rather than a series of short, separate experiences, we needed a platform from which learners could launch into the Hacktober world. To deliver this, our team set about designing and specifying a fully bespoke learning ‘micro-site’ for the 2022 campaign.
This micro-site would serve a critical purpose: guiding and motivating learners through the Hacktober experience. By adopting the same visual style and adding real gamification mechanics to the game-style theme, our platform became not only the hub for Hacktober 2022, but integral to the experience itself.
On top of that, the platform made the whole initiative technically possible. It hosted and surfaced all of our content and resources, it accommodated all of Meta’s 75,000+ learners and captured all of the engagement data that Meta needed to measure the success of the campaign.
The Hacktober micro-site became a portal into the Hacktober 2022 world. With engaging visuals and gamification, learners were drawn into the Hacktober journey of discovery and motivated to progress.
As a reward for reading, watching, and listening to content, learners earned in-game ‘runes’, virtual, collectable tokens that could be tracked through the microsite. These runes added elements of reward and friendly competition to the campaign, helping to boost learner engagement and return visits.
To ensure consistency in design of the site, templates were developed to build the Hacktober content. Infographics and blog posts created with these templates served as the primary sources of information for learners in the campaign, providing bite-sized breakdowns of topics and deeper dives into complex issues and conversation worthy topics.
To bring the drier topics of cybersecurity to life, an animation series was created to further explore the world of Hacktober 2022. Using animated characters, the animations brought learners into new environments that felt like different parts of the same world.
The ‘Fox’ and ‘Meta-Bot’ characters served as consistent protagonists in the Hacktober world, guiding the learner through the carefully crafted environments. Tailored to fit the topics they were covering, the animations allowed learners to meet new characters and scenarios, all while staying consistent with the overall Hacktober 2022 world and theme. One of the challenges was making the narration feel relevant to the themes of the animation. This was achieved by creatively using video game mechanics, settings, and tropes to mirror the topics of the animated stories.
The Hack, a live action “whodunnit” series, ran alongside the Hacktober 2022 campaign. This video series was created with the purpose of challenging learners to think about the risks to cyber safety in a lateral way and discuss cybersecurity in a relaxed setting. The mystery encouraged learners to try to solve the crime themselves as they watched, which enabled them to play an active role in the learning.
Our overarching vision was a cohesive end-to-end campaign experience that captivated audiences and could offer a similarly energetic and engaging way to learn as the face-to-face, pre-pandemic alternatives.
At its core, Hacktober aimed to enhance the understanding of cybersecurity best practices, the responsibilities of Meta colleagues, and the roles of cybersecurity functions within the business. Moving Hacktober to run as a fully online experience in 2022 presented an opportunity to address the aforementioned goals, ensuring an engaging and cohesive learning experience while improving data collection capabilities.
The 2022 Hacktober journey created something new and different, an exciting, rewarding, and cohesive storytelling learning experience, which generated conversation and real engagement. We were able to track the continuing page views over the course of the month, showing how the campaign succeeded as a continuing source of re-engagement over time, rather than a ‘broadcast-and-done', flash-in-the-pan.
total page views over one month.
learner engagement with the microsite.
users accommodated on the microsite.
