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EIT Food Entrepreneurship Recruitment Campaign
For two years in a row, we have been EIT Food Entrepreneurship’s agency partner, building robust campaigns that engage leading food innovation startups and drive applications to EIT Food Entrepreneurship’s cohorts.
Challenge
EIT Food Entrepreneurship comprises 3 distinct programmes: Seedbed Incubator, EIT Food Accelerator Network, and RisingFoodStars. Each programme addresses a different stage of the entrepreneurial journey with unique needs, wants and pain points, and as such needs to have a distinct communication approach, whilst not straying too far from the overarching brand identity of EIT Food.
In order to effectively address and attract applicants for all programmes, EIT Food Entrepreneurship needed a multi-channel, full-funnel strategy that could leverage various channels to optimise for lead generation, funnel engagement and conversion. Each programme had to be distinctively represented, alongside high-level messaging about the 3 programmes as a whole. For a project this size, the strategy had to be flexible and ever-adapting based on performance data gathered throughout the process.
Insight
Our research focused on identifying the behaviours of each audience — from early-stage startups to scaleups — and their pain points. Given the differing offerings of each EIT Food Entrepreneurship programme, we identified the most important value propositions for each audience segment and structured the campaigns accordingly.
Whilst unique in its structure, EIT Food Entrepreneurship sometimes seems complex to new audiences, and many struggle to identify which programme is best for them, or drop off partway through the application process. As such, we focused on creating effective re-targeting journeys, ensuring personalised follow-ups and clear benefits for each programme.
Answer
We created a full-funnel marketing strategy that effectively led the target audience from awareness through to sign-up for one of the three programmes. Using audience behaviour and retargeting at its core, the campaign began with broad, benefits-led messaging to attract potential applicants and used behavioural data from website visits to trigger personalised follow-ups via paid and email channels. This ensured that potential applicants were always reminded of the opportunities at hand and could easily follow the journey to completing the sign-up.
We built a seamless loop between web visits and email marketing, targeting users with benefit-driven communication to guide them through the funnel and ensure leads were followed up with effectively. The messaging adapted depending on the user behaviour to optimise conversion rates and maintain engagement.
We also developed a key messaging framework to ensure consistent language across channels and audiences, and a communications toolkit to activate the wider EIT Food network of employees, partners and alumni. This approach allowed all channels, including paid, organic, referral and email, to work in sync, increasing both efficiency and overall reach and impact.
Scope
- Audience research and segmentation
- Full-funnel messaging and content strategy
- Paid media campaigns (Meta, LinkedIn
- Email marketing and CRM journeys
- Toolkit design for partner-led communications
- Reporting and campaign optimisation
Based on learnings from the 2024 campaign, showing that applicants themselves often weren’t sure which programme to apply for, we shifted the focus of the 2025 campaign to nurturing all potential applicants and focusing the communication around the overall benefits of the programmes and the time left to apply. This not only made communication around the campaign more efficient, but also increased applications by 21% year on year.
Recruitment Campaign 2024:
The email strategy yielded high open (58.79%) and click (8.6%) rates well above industry benchmarks (NGOs; 40.03% & 3.27% respectively). This translated to 20% of the total applications coming from this organic channel.
The paid media campaign 2024 successfully captured a wide audience, as indicated by exceeding the Impression and Clicks KPIs using the broad targeting attributes. It also successfully retained and converted those who showed keen interest in the opportunity, using later phases of the campaign as well as other channels. In the end, paid media accounted for 14.5% of total conversion.
The social media toolkit was also effective, and about 20% of total applicants reported learning about the programme from an EIT Food organisation member or partner. The members who utilised this toolkit to spread the word about the opportunity shared their positive feedback on its ease of use.
Lastly, the high open rate and click rates of the reminder emails (67% and 18% respectively) demonstrated their effectiveness in encouraging and motivating applicants to complete their applications. By the end of the Recruitment Call, we achieved a high application completion rate of 51%.
In 2025:
By incorporating learnings from 2024, we maintained strong results across email and paid social media, staying at or above benchmarks. The overall number of completed applications rose by 21% compared to the previous year, showing the impact of a successful campaign across channels.
Impact
By activating multiple channels through a comprehensive strategy, we saw an uplift in both awareness and conversions for the campaign. Each channel contributed to the campaign's success in its unique way, and backed by audience research and behaviour data, the campaign followed a well–rounded approach end-to-end.
Working with the Dante Media team was a great experience. Their fresh and creative communication strategy hit the mark for us, opening up new approaches, channels, and recommendations our team hadn’t tried before to enhance our outreach to researchers, startups and scaleups in AgriFoodTech.
Beyond these marketing efforts, the team also provided us with strong support in project management to ensure that tasks and deadlines were well-coordinated among the three teams. Thanks to these efforts, we saw great results with impressive email open rates, website performance, and a high application completion rate. Most importantly, we couldn't be happier with the high quality of the final applicants, showing how these efforts helped attract the right audience.
Related press.
https://www.confectionerynews.com/Article/2024/01/31/EIT-Food-calls-for-applications-for-its-2024-Entrepreneurship-programs
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