Context
#WomensHistoryMonth was an eight-part Instagram series produced for Rutgers University's main account during Women's History Month 2022, featuring eight current Rutgers women on the legacy they were given and the legacy they're building.
Approach
I built the campaign around women who are still becoming, and asked each of them what legacy she hopes to leave and what she makes of the legacy she was given. Those two questions split legacy into something inherited and something in progress.
The same tension ran through the year's largest women's-history moments. Ketanji Brown Jackson framed her Supreme Court arrival as one generation's distance from her parents' segregated schooling. When the U.S. women's soccer team settled for equal pay, the players dedicated the moment to past leaders and to the girls who would follow. The women who made news that year were inheriting something and handing it forward. The campaign looked for that same story at student scale, in women already leading on campus.
For one, legacy meant making a community feel welcome. For another, it meant making history. The campaign let those definitions stand instead of settling on one.
Execution
I started from the Rutgers–New Brunswick student organization database and reached out widely, asking each org to nominate a woman to represent it. Around twenty came back, and I narrowed to a final eight chosen for a diverse spread of fields and backgrounds.
Each woman answered a custom prompt in her own words over email. I edited only for brevity and left individual voice untouched, and I wrote the recurring framing line that opened every post. For the portraits, I asked each woman to pick a place on campus she resonated with and photographed her there, so the setting was her choice and the image showcased her statement rather than overshadowing it.
The series ran on @rutgersu, the university's main account, as eight posts from March 8 to April 5, 2022. I opened on International Women's Day and posted roughly twice a week. I ran the project largely on my own, credited as photographer, copywriter, photo editor, and social media manager.
Results
Across the eight posts, the series drew 7,726 likes and 310 comments, averaging about 966 likes and 39 comments per post. The series opened on International Women's Day with Sophia Mirrione's feature, which drew 1,200 likes and 37 comments. The strongest single post came late in the run: Serah Sannoh's feature on March 31 led the series with 1,287 likes and 81 comments. Samantha Lee's mid-March feature also cleared 1,100 likes. The range ran wide, from Maniyah Figueroa's 547 likes to Serah's 1,287, so individual features carried very differently even under one campaign.
Engagement held across the full month rather than fading after the launch, and the back half of the run performed as well as the opening. The most telling pattern was in the comments, which did not track likes. Duaa Ali's closing feature drew 997 likes but 71 comments, and Serah's drew 81, while features with comparable like counts drew a third as many. Because each of these women leads a cohort or organization, the comment sections became a show of those communities turning out for their leader. The campaign set out to honor women building legacies through community, and the comments were that work proving itself, the people these women lead showing up for them in public.
