If you’ve got a piece of 8-1/2″ x 11″ paper, a printer and a pair of scissors, prepare to load luggage-sized efficiency into your pocket. Slip your week’s schedule, travel games and puzzles, notes, conversion tables and much more into your wallet.
“If this isn’t a true definition of community, I don’t know what is.”
-Bobbie Davis, Family Friend
The Scenario
Nineteen year old Michael Treinen is in the fight of his life. Suffering a relapse of Acute Myeloid Leukemia, he needs a $500,000 bone marrow transplant, but his $1M lifetime insurance limit has been exhausted.
With only a few days to raise money to cover the costs, the Treinan family turned to email, asking friends and family to donate $20 within three days and forward the email to 20 friends. By day 2, several people at Brainstorm had received the plea from the nearby community; some from up to 4 different sources.
More than Enough
The message quickly spread beyond the immediate community and donations came in from across the country. By day 3 the family had raised $175,000. By 3pm day 4, $355,000. By 7pm that day, over $400,000. And by day 5, the deadline, they had raised over $700,000. Today, a week later, the count is $856,000.
The media’s coverage of the grassroots campaign resulted in a state insurance program approving an expedited high-risk insurance policy that would cover 60 percent of the transplant cost.
More than Money
Social networking delivered something else, too. At last count Michael Treinen’s Caring Bridge blog showed 169,670 visits and 3,677 people had left messages via the guestbook. What better encouragement to lift Michael’s spirits?
More than Email
Success in social networking is inspired, launched and sustained by the trusted connections between people. The Treinen’s email pleas were sent from friend to friend; had they been sent from strangers or generated by faceless scripts, the Michael Treinen story wouldn’t have happened.
Whether you make widgets or offer something more philanthropic, social networking demands transparency and an ongoing investment in others. Then, when the time calls for it, your friends—and even people you don’t know—may respond when called upon.
Anticipate More
Under the circumstances, the Treinens couldn’t have dreamed of, much less considered what to do should they exceed their expectations. It’s being placed in a trust fund to cover Michael’s future medical needs and they’ve said any overage will be donated to charity.
The lesson being, be prepared and model outcomes to scale in proportion to the potential explosive power of online social campaigns.
The new ferocious face of the Hamilton Southeastern High School Royals
“Our identity was fragmented; it lacked the presence a class 5A high school athletics program ought to project.”
-Greg Habegger, Hamilton Southeastern Athletic Director
Big Stakes
Brainstorm has branded many sports teams, venues, and organizations over the years: The Indianapolis 500, the U.S. Grand Prix Formula 1 race, the Brickyard 400 and 3M Performance 400 NASCAR races, the Disney 200, Conseco Fieldhouse, the NCAA Hardwood Cafe, RCA Dome, soccer associations…and now, the local high school?
Professional and college sports programs have become increasingly aware and protective of brand equity and the revenue it generates. High school sport programs that “borrow” identity elements in part or in whole from collegiate or professional teams often meet with threats of litigation.
Big Vision
With that in mind, and a desire to create an identity that transcended standard high school fare, Hamilton Southeastern High School’s athletic director, Greg Habegger, tapped Brainstorm to create the new Royals identity system.
Redesigned all-sports program cover and football helmet—click to see larger view.
The Brand Audit
Brainstorm reviewed Hamilton Southeastern High School’s (HSE) brand identity and found a pencil rendering—loosely based on a piece of clip art—being used in a myriad of graphic styles in more than 15 interpretations to depict the Royal’s lion mascot, “Roarie.”
The artwork was too soft and detailed to reproduce properly at smaller sizes and across various mediums. But even more importantly, Roarie was not fearsome-looking but rather passive and friendly.
“Brainstorm’s branding elevated our Royals identity to a professional or collegiate level.”
-Jim Self, Hamilton Southeastern Athletic Director
What’s in a Name?
Hamilton Southeastern High School Royals is a mouthful to say. Taking a cue from fans who generally refer to the school teams as the Royals, Southeastern, or HSE, we opted to drop the county name, Hamilton, in conjunction with the school’s athletic team identities.
Branding 101
Unlike professional team identities which are designed for a single sport, out of necessity, we approached the project more like a collegiate mark needing to encompass many sports. The identity needed to be flexible enough to allow for individual sport identification while retaining a strong core brand identity. We designed a system that worked as a family based on the core mark above.
Broad-based Deliverables
Brainstorm created a media cd and usage guidelines to assist the athletic directors in managing the brand rollout. We also re-graphicized the gymnasium floor, created back-lit dimensional entryway signs to the Royals sports complex, and designed a variety of logowear apparel.
In addition, we created over 35 logomark variations to give individual sports a unique identity within the Royals brand.
To see more brand deliverables click to play.
Between booster clubs, coach’s and team apparel, sports venues, signage and the like, a large high school has nearly as many branding needs as a collegiate program. (Trust us on that.) The rebranding effort began in December, 2005 and is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
Brainstorm created a proprietary online tool to track B Series activity including offer page visits, video views, downloads, survey data and much more.
39% increase in average daily hits on BrainstormBrand.com during the B Series promotion.
Objectives, Then Numbers
The B Series was created as the initial step in an ongoing awareness campaign targeted to a group of C-level marketing executives and decision makers with little or no previous knowledge of Brainstorm. Our goal for the multiple-component B2B campaign was simply to build name recognition and knowledge of our firm’s capabilities.
All statistics and results were measured with that primary objective in mind, but we were also interested in how each piece performed. Because of the nature of the campaign and the protracted sales cycle in our industry, an accurate ROI measurement isn’t yet feasible; however we created a unique offer landing page for each recipient and an online tool to track their individual responses. With a total response rate of 14%, unique visits to the offer site looked like this:
B Series Response Rates
What Worked
Our mass HTML email had a 22% open rate and 3% unique click-throughs; however, the fourth piece in the series, the personal email, was the most effective with 7.5% of recipients visiting the offer page. This strong response confirms that multiple touchpoints built name recognition. After several contacts, recipients felt comfortable opening an email from someone they didn’t know and clicking through to learn more about our company.
18% of the respondents visited the offer site multiple times.
Visitor Activity
Once visitors were at the offer site, 29% watched a video, 50% downloaded the Web 2.0 Summary Sheet and 50% downloaded the MediaSphere.
Telling Numbers
In addition to traffic to the offer page, during the three initial mailers and the mass HTML email, average hits per day on our corporate website increased 50% over the preceding 15 days. After the personal email, average hits per day were up 79% over pre-campaign traffic. Across the two and a half-month promotion, average daily hits increased 39% overall.
25% increase in direct traffic to BrainstormBrand.com during the promotion.
What We’d Do Differently
Two weeks toward the end of the campaign were reserved for three of Brainstorm’s principals to make personal follow-up phone calls—not to hard sell, but to merely introduce themselves. It proved difficult to connect with a live person. We left voicemail and spoke to several people, but the results weren’t worth the effort of calling the entire list. Next time, we’ll follow up via phone with only individuals who have expressed a tacit interest by taking specific action while visiting the offer site.
Qualitative Metrics
Relying on percentages and numbers alone is ill-advised when measuring objectives. A myriad of variables affect the success of any consumer or B2B marketing campaign: need, timing, industry, execution, audience, and messaging are just a few.
Our initial effort exceeded our expectations by creating awareness and developing relationships that have resulted in new work and ongoing discussions with an audience previously unaware of us. We will continue to reach out to these individuals throughout 2008 in an attempt to build trust and relationship equity through various means.
B Series Resources
To read previous installments in this series or download one of the marketing tools from the offer, click on a link below or “B Series” under topics:
Brainstorm took a break from .think during December to focus on our clients’ increased holiday workloads, and create our own brand of holiday fun at North Pole, Inc. (NPI).
More Parody
Initially created to thank, entertain, and interact with our clients, the project featured a daily website post detailing the mirthful trials and tribulations of NPI’s Executive Vice President, Cindy Klaus, and their larger-than-life CEO, Kris Kringle. By months’ end, the integrated print/online parody expanded virally to include a far broader audience, including Cindy Klaus’ own Twitter following.
Friendly Links
Visitors were encouraged to leave a greeting with the added incentive of winning a B brilliant t-shirt or Kris Kringle chocolates. We received a nice holiday surprise ourselves with many unsolicited links to the NPI site. Here are a couple of our favorites:
A Viddler Unboxing showed a video of the “unboxing” of one of our Kris Kringle chocolates.
Thanks and Happy New Year
To all who visited and participated, thanks for the links, comments, emails, calls, Twitter tweets, and Facebook posts. Happy New Year. It’s good to be back.
Here’s a free Mac app allowing you to call up, via customized abbreviations, any text string you copy and paste frequently. Best of all the text is placed pre-formatted - returns, bullets and all. It’s become a staple here at Brainstorm. You can download your own at app4mac.
If you can get past the vapid brand identity and UI, PimpMyNews, the talking social news site, is an interesting concept. The site will read your RSS feeds to you over your mp3 player, iPhone, etc. or computer.
[via: PR-Squared]
NPI’s personal cosmos transport. Like Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine Happiness Machine, the iPlanet, a holiday product parody, promises a “thoroughly self-absorbed social media experience.”
Robert Scoble explores the notion in this BusinessWeek piece re: the running debate over where we’re headed with aging, albeit ubiquitous, email paradigms versus spam-free Tweets.
[via: Scobleizer]
Track the Hive’s Buzz
Aggregate the aggregators at Popurls.com—simultaneously follow the most current posts from all the top sites like Digg, Newsvine, YouTube and Flickr. Or, “find your favorite thing,” over at Buzzfeed.
Peter Bruhn’s Swedish type foundry is preparing a new freshet of fonts to flow forth and flourish among us—according to Typographi and Bruhn himself.
[via: Sheer Brick]
Can’t see how your two soda bottles a day are impacting the environment? Chris Jordan’s images will help you visualize it. View his amazing statistical depictions at Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait.
Okay this would just be a goofy flash-based Spirograph-esque toy if it didn’t generate downloadable .svg (Scalable Vector Graphic) files—which it does. Pattern enthusiasts, meet Qbesq.
Enter at your own risk. A proof of concept that design does matter. Havenworks.com hailed on Digg recently as perhaps, “…the most poorly designed website in the world!”
Tags: Higher Ed Marketing, Productivity, Recent Thought, Featured, Philanthropy, Products, Healthcare, Foundation Marketing, Financial
