Building a Public Platform for Women of Pōneke's Events
Women of Pōneke partnered with Virtual Marketers to bring focus and structure to their social media activity and to establish a public presence for the organisation.
Within three months, reach, engagement and event attendance had all measurably shifted. One event was sold out within a week.
RESULTS AT A GLANCE
Our Performance Metrics
339
followers from a standing start, 335 of them within the first 30 days.
2,383
impressions from a page live for under three weeks of the reporting window.
6.3%
engagement rate with 136 reactions, 8 comments and 5 reposts.
5
reposts from partners and community members, putting Women of Pōneke in front of networks the group format could not reach.
Intro
In the beginning
Women of Pōneke is a Wellington-based community for wāhine, built on a simple framework of Me. We. Pōneke, the personal, the community and the city.
The organisation runs regular events that consistently fill on word of mouth, and its membership includes chefs, artists, founders, leaders and makers from across the capital.Women of Pōneke is run by a team of women who give their time for free, building this community and putting on these events for the wāhine of Wellington around their own full-time jobs.
Much of that work happens late at night and at weekends. What they needed was a partner who could bring dedicated time, energy and focus to a social media programme, so that more women across the city could find out about Women of Pōneke.
Virtual Marketers came on board in mid-April 2026. Content was being created around events as they came up, without a shared plan the whole team could work from. The organisation’s LinkedIn presence sat within a members-only group, which meant partners, venues, sponsors and speakers could not be tagged, and the organisation did not surface to women who had not already found it.
THE APPROACH
Our approach focused on a range of key objectives:
Structured Content Planning: Establish a consistent, planned posting rhythm across channels, with clear visibility and sign-off for the client team.
A Public-Facing Presence: Move the organisation from a closed group format to a public LinkedIn company page to unlock discoverability, tagging and analytics.
Partner and Sponsor Visibility: Enable partners, venues and speakers to be tagged and to amplify Women of Pōneke to their own networks.
Storytelling at Scale: Develop an ongoing content series to profile members of the community and warm audiences ahead of event ticket releases.
Event Attendance: Use planned content to build demand ahead of ticket release rather than relying on word of mouth alone.
The primary challenge lies in unifying disparate marketing efforts. When teams operate in silos, the brand's unique value proposition becomes diluted, leading to inconsistent messaging that confuses prospects and slows down the overall sales cycle.
To address this, we adopted a dual approach: deeply auditing internal capabilities while simultaneously analyzing outward market perceptions. This dual-lens strategy uncovers high-impact opportunities, paving the way for cohesive, scalable growth.
THE SOLUTION
One team
Working closely with the Women of Pōneke team, we delivered a programme of social media strategy, content planning and copywriting. Key actions included:
01
Rolling Content Calendar
We built a rolling calendar that operates as a shared source of truth and sign-off document between Virtual Marketers and the Women of Pōneke team. It sets a consistent posting cadence across platforms, maps content to the event cycle so audiences are warmed up ahead of ticket releases, and gives the client visibility and approval before anything goes live.
For a volunteer-led organisation, this removed the weekly scramble for content decisions.
02
Created and launched the Women of Pōneke LinkedIn company page in early July 2026, giving the organisation a public professional presence in Wellington for the first time.
The launch was announced to the existing group community, bringing the established audience across rather than starting from zero.
Over 110 women followed the page on the first day.
03
Voices of Pōneke Content Series
We developed and launched an ongoing series spotlighting women from across the city. Each feature follows a set format built on the brand’s storytelling principle that stories are facts wrapped in emotion, opening with a single human image and leading with feeling before bringing in the detail of her craft and career.
The series celebrates individual wāhine and introduces event speakers as people well before they appear in a line-up.
04
Event Campaign Support
We planned and wrote the campaign for the 10 September kai and hospitality evening, including a ticket-release post that tagged Luna Estate as drinks partner, named Everybody Eats in the kitchen and credited photographer Melanie Parkin, three acknowledgements that were not possible in the ‘LinkedIn Group’ format.
05
Meta Content Programme
Extended consistent posting across Facebook and Instagram, building a consistent rhythm of event photography, recap content, alongside the LinkedIn activity.
06
Performance Reporting
Established page analytics and reporting so audience response feeds directly back into the content calendar.
KEY OUTCOMES
Some pretty incredible outcomes
The LinkedIn company page was live for barely three weeks within the first reporting period, with no paid promotion and no inherited follower base.
LinkedIn Company Page
First Month (27 June – 26 July 2026) 339 followers from a standing start, 335 of them within the first 30 days.
2,383 impressions from a page live for under three weeks of the reporting window.
A 6.3% engagement rate - 136 reactions, 8 comments and 5 reposts. LinkedIn company pages typically sit at around 2%, so the page launched at roughly three times the benchmark.
5 reposts from partners and community members, putting Women of Pōneke in front of networks the group format could not reach.
Event Campaign
120 seats sold out inside a week. Tickets for the 10 September event went live on 14 July and the event was fully booked by 21 July.
A peak of 435 impressions in a single day on 16 July, the page’s strongest day of the month, driven by the ticket-release post.
2 of the month’s 5 reposts landed on the ticket-release post alone.
The shape of the growth reflects the strategy: a sharp follower spike when the page was announced to the existing community, a steady climb as new people discovered it, and a content-driven peak in mid-July as the event went live and partners shared it. The community brought the initial audience across; planned content is what is holding it.
Meta/Facebook
Every result below was achieved organically. No money was spent on boosting or advertising during the period.
• 7,717 views, up 473%, all of them organic.
• 3,893 individual viewers, up approximately 1,700%, showing reach extending well beyond the existing follower base.
• 123 content interactions, up 273%, and 1 hour 41 minutes of watch time, up approximately 2,500%.
• 33 new page follows, up 267%.
• Published content more than doubled, from 9 pieces to 19 (17 photos and 2 reels), reflecting the cadence set by the content calendar.
• Event photography is the standout format. Multi-photo posts drove 4,969 views, close to two thirds of the total, ahead of single photos at 1,581 and reels at 1,156.
• The strongest post of the period was the event recap on 5 June, at 4,400 views and 30 reactions. The 4 June follow-up earned the highest reaction count of any post at 49, with 5 shares, and the 15 July ticket-release post reached 1,400 views with 36 reactions and 5 shares.
Putting it simply, Virtual Marketing has changed the lives for me and my WOP team members. Since Fran Bellingham (the owner of VM) generously put her hand up to support Women of Poneke, (free of charge) a load has been lifted from our to-do list.
Once she said yes, we were allocated the creative, responsive and super-efficient Digital Boss Lady/ manager, Jodie Woods.
The visibility, the tone and the energy of WOP has since spread, adding even more appeal to a movement we began three years ago, never anticipating that growth would be so phenomenal.
Jodie is a delight to work with. Always enthusiastic, always willing and always so damn clever.
We now have a consistent look, story and schedule that fills our hearts and our cups. We’re so grateful to have this support from Virtual Marketing. Thank you VM Whizz Women!
Amanda Millar
Women of PōnekeGET IN TOUCH
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