Creating Global Impact: How Our Digital Agency Helped Eli Lilly Shine on Global Day of Service

In 2016, our digital agency had the incredible honor of winning a Hermes Gold Award for our work with Eli Lilly and Company’s Global Day of Service (GDOS). This recognition really meant a lot to us — it validated our commitment to creating digital experiences that drive engagement and elevate corporate social responsibility initiatives in a way that genuinely resonates with people.

Behind the Mission

Eli Lilly’s GDOS is a massive corporate volunteer program, involving nearly 24,000 employees across over 65 countries in one single day. Our mission? To develop an interactive, mobile-first platform that captured and shared the diversity of volunteer efforts in real time, giving people an inside view of the impact these employees were making around the world.

Bringing the Vision to Life

With just six weeks to pull it off, we jumped in alongside Lilly to design and launch the GDOS Event Hub. This platform brought together live social media content — Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram photos, videos, and more — all showing the unique volunteer activities of Lilly employees. We created custom algorithms to aggregate and display posts tagged with #WeAreLilly, ensuring a smooth, engaging user experience that felt effortless.

To encourage employee participation, we helped Lilly launch an internal campaign, inspiring people to share their personal GDOS moments. On the day of the event, our team was hands-on, managing the Event Hub, creating original content, and moderating over 2,500 individual submissions in real time.

Making Waves: The Impact

The GDOS Event Hub brought the stories of Lilly’s employees and partners to life, and the response was fantastic:

• Twitter: Over 1,500 tweets from employees and partner organizations, reaching an estimated 5.8 million users
• Facebook: Lilly’s posts reached more than 131,000 people, generating over 2,000 reactions
• Instagram: Employees and partners shared over 320 images with #WeAreLilly, with Lilly’s posts receiving more than 4,000 likes and a potential reach of 215,000 users

Our targeted ad campaign boosted this engagement even further, generating:

• Over 320,000 impressions
• More than 5,660 engagements
• Nearly 270 new page follows
• 70 shares across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

A Gold Star Moment

This collaborative effort earned us the Hermes Gold Award, recognizing not just our work but the dedication and teamwork that made the GDOS Event Hub possible. We’re genuinely proud to have played a part in bringing Lilly’s Global Day of Service to life — connecting employees around the world and showcasing the impact of collective action through digital innovation.