Job campaign that far exceeded the island municipality's expectations

Client: Fedje Municipality

We created a job posting campaign for Fedje where the campaign page was based on scrollytelling and the ads sold the Fedje lifestyle.

Work: Campaign site, content, digital marketing

When one of Norway's smallest municipalities needed to recruit new staff, we didn't just sell the jobs. We sold the entire Fedje lifestyle. The result exceeded all their expectations.

Mockup showing the scrollytelling landing page for the job posting campaign for Fedje municipality

Mockup showing the scrollytelling landing page for Fedje Municipality's job posting campaign on mobile

The island of Fedje enjoys an exotic and idyllic location out in the sea in the west. It has experienced the same thing that many peripheral municipalities have in recent decades: fewer and fewer inhabitants.

But unlike many other municipalities, Fedje has stopped, and apparently reversed, the trend. They have managed to do this with a mixture of targeted work, creativity, determination and external and local investors and drivers.

In the spring of 2023, they were to recruit just under a dozen people at the same time: Everything from two new municipal managers to teachers and environmental workers.

Bønes Virik helped them find the best candidates for the municipal manager positions, while we were to help them find, tempt and convince well-qualified candidates for the other positions.

We did this through a campaign that focused as much on Fedje life as on the position.

See the campaign here.

The concept: More than a job

Working in Fedje most likely also means moving to Fedje, an island municipality with 500 inhabitants. That's why we had to sell the whole of Fedje as a community, local environment and lifestyle - not just the jobs.

We needed to showcase all the qualities of living in Fedje, especially those that set it apart from more urban places. Together with the municipality and the local community, we found that the most important qualities were: Time, quality of life, togetherness and nature.

Municipal Director Berit Karin Rystad sums it up nicely: "Fedje has so much to offer for those who value nature and the positive enthusiasm you typically find in small communities."

In other words, we had to sell emotion as much as reason.

The answer was scrollytelling built with the DigiStory solution: A landing page where large images and small but strong texts make the reader scroll through the information.

Scrollytelling is a way of making your message vivid and attractive. When done correctly, measurements show that the majority of readers scroll all the way through.

The result was a campaign that succeeded in awakening people's desire to experience "Fedje life".

"This was a completely new way of marketing the positions, and we got a far better response than we've had before. We received 27 well-qualified applicants for the two municipal managers alone." says Rystad of Fedje Municipality.

Screenshot from digital job campaign in the form of scrollytelling for Fedje municipality. The image shows a woman paddling in the sea, as well as the text "The most precious thing you have is your time."

The ads for the job campaign for Fedje municipality

Over twice as efficient as normal

Once the concept was nailed down and the story created, it was a matter of getting the content out to as many relevant candidates as possible. One challenge was that there were so many different positions within several sectors.

The solution was to advertise in Norwegian online newspapers, mainly targeting readers in Nordhordland and Bergen and the surrounding area.

The result was far beyond all expectations.

During the campaign period, the ads were shown 858,649 times and achieved a click-through rate of 0.49%. The expected "normal" for such ads is a click-through rate of 0.20 percent, so the Fedje ads performed almost two and a half times better than expected!

In total, approximately 6,000 people visited the campaign page, of which 4,200 came in via the ads.

The concept, the campaign page and the advertising all contributed to Fedje filling nine of the eleven advertised positions with well-qualified people. This was far above what they, and many other smaller outlying municipalities, are used to achieving.