Peer Review Week: Campaign Planning to Post-Campaign Reporting
An international awareness campaign planned, produced, and executed across channels against a fixed global date.
Situation
Peer Review Week is an annual international event recognizing the role of peer review in scholarly publishing. It runs on a fixed global calendar with a theme announced in advance, and participating publishers produce their own programming around it.
For ACS Publications in 2023, the objective was conversion, not awareness: move reviewers and prospective reviewers into Reviewer Lab and out the other side as certified ACS reviewers. The theme that year was peer review and the future of publishing, and every element of the campaign was built to point back at that certification path.
I inherited the campaign and expanded it substantially — adding a global webinar, a live conference component, and a daily social mechanic that used Reviewer Lab content directly.
Constraints
The date was not negotiable. Peer Review Week happens when it happens, globally, and content that lands afterward has no value. Everything had to be ready before the window opened.
The contributor base compounded that. Content came from journal editors, authors, and publishing division staff distributed worldwide — people who did not report to me, had competing editorial priorities, and were working across time zones. The campaign also ran across five channels with different production lead times, from same-day social to a webinar requiring speaker coordination across continents.
Approach
Content production
The Axial blog series was the spine of the week — a daily post from journal editors on a different facet of the theme, running every day of the observance. Sourcing, scheduling, and editorial coordination ran through me.
Global webinar
I partnered with ACS on Campus to produce Adapting to AI in Peer Review and the Publishing Process, an interview-format session with an ACS journal editor and a subject-matter expert based in Brazil. It ran mid-week to a global audience and landed among the highest-engagement webinars in the program.
Reviewer recognition
The week opened Monday morning with a recognition email to every reviewer who had served between the two Peer Review Weeks, paired with an infographic quantifying the reviewer community's accomplishments over that year. A companion social asset invited reviewers to complete the statement "I am the future of ACS peer review because…" and tag the journals they had reviewed or published with — turning recognition into distribution.
Daily social mechanic
The week opened Monday morning with a recognition email to every reviewer who had served between the two Peer Review Weeks, paired with an infographic quantifying the reviewer community's accomplishments over that year. A companion social asset invited reviewers to complete the statement "I am the future of ACS peer review because…" and tag the journals they had reviewed or published with — turning recognition into distribution.
Channel orchestration
The campaign ran across Axial, email through Eloqua, social, the ACS Webinars program, and the Peer Review Week organizers' own event hub, with promotion beginning ahead of the window and each channel sequenced to the day rather than published independently.
Stakeholder coordination
A weekly standing meeting began three months before the observance and ran through the planning cycle, with journal editors, publishing division staff, and the Reviewer Lab product manager. Roles, tasks, and deadlines were documented and distributed, so every participant knew what they owed and when, independent of whether I reminded them. The same group functioned as the campaign's ideation body: the conference quiz and the daily social poll both came out of that room, and having the Reviewer Lab product manager in it is what let the certification content become campaign mechanics rather than a link at the bottom of a post.
Outcome
Everything shipped inside the observance window. The campaign activated five channels — Axial, email, social, ACS Webinars, and the organizers' event hub — with a daily blog post from journal editors running the length of the week, a recognition email to the full reviewer cohort, a live conference session with a real-time leaderboard, and a daily social poll drawn from Reviewer Lab. The AI and peer review webinar drew global attendance and ranked among the highest-engagement sessions in the program.
What this project demonstrates
Campaign operations is the discipline of making a fixed date survive contact with distributed contributors, multiple channels, and competing priorities. The content is the visible part; the underlying schedule architecture is the work.
This campaign required backward planning from an immovable international date, coordination across stakeholders outside my reporting line, production across five channels with different lead times, and a conversion path — Reviewer Lab certification — that every element had to point back toward.