The Distinguished Citizen Award Dinner invitation and program celebrated our 26th year and most successful event ever. This collateral material would be seen by many key business and community leaders in Baltimore.
The DCAD committee, through Constellation Energy's creative team, developed the image of the Boy Scout leader holding the lighting bolt and the event theme "Scouting & Constellation—Powering the Future." Many positive comments were received about the logo and theme.
This event raised almost $200,000 in 2005, which was the most ever. The proceeds benefit the Scoutreach program in Baltimore's inner city.
We learned that high-quality collateral material makes the difference when planning an important council event.
To produce a well-designed, informative, interesting collateral piece directed at volunteers. Relaying the council's trail map to the future emphasizes the programs and opportunities that the Scouting program brings to youth in our community. The goal was to enhance existing communication with a long-range plan that addresses the vision for the future in a number of categories: providing youth with safe outdoor experiences, community service opportunities, and leadership experience; broadening the reach of the Scouting program to serve more youth; changing lives; operating strong district and council structures; and engaging a strong group of volunteers.
The concept to produce a strategic plan report for an organization serving thousands of members with vast program diversity was a tremendous challenge. Volunteer leadership was vital to the success of this year-long process. The title Scouting Changes Lives captures the vision of the volunteer team that created the plan with future members in mind. Design and layout were completed in-house by Jim Hill, director of Camping & Properties, and printing was completed by Stevens Printing, a local print vendor.
The 2005-2009 Strategic Plan—Our Map for the Future was well received. The report helped to generate discussion around the topics council leadership felt most pertinent; therefore, strategic plan rollout meetings proved to be more productive. Leaders seemed to digest the information more completely than when information was offered in other formats. The report contains strong quotes throughout in direct correlation to main categories. Readers reported that the report helped to clarify questions regarding the future of the Cascade Pacific Council.
The objective of this DVD project was to provide positive, professional pieces to be used at community fund-raising breakfasts, Family Friends of Scouting presentations, and school nights. Our goal was to have the two videos and two slide shows that would cause the adult audience of business leaders and parents to act, either to donate funds toward Scouting or to sign their family up to join Scouting, as well as to build awareness of our organization's mission and brand identity.
Members of the council marketing committee collaborated with Garrigan Lyman, who has generously donated countless hours of pro bono work, to plan the direction of these pieces. Emphasis was placed on shooting a diverse group of youth and Eagle Scout adults who are prominent in our community. Part of the planning process was deciding how the pieces would be utilized. The first slide show was to be played while guests entered the room, the first video shown within the first 10 minutes of the event, the second video viewed just prior to the ask (to give or join), and the final slide show while guests departed.
The end result of this project was that our council had a 16 percent increase over 2004 in our Friends of Scouting campaign, totaling more than 1.9 million FOS dollars raised, which was 108 percent of our goal. Numerous viewers remarked at the quality of the pieces and indicated that tears came to their eyes because the videos reminded them of their own Scouting experiences.
We learned that videos and other visual images can make an enormous impact on people during events. Creating pieces and selecting music that invoke laughter, nostalgia, tears, and other emotional responses and using them at strategic times can help make fund-raising events very successful. We also learned that our members enjoyed them so much that they wanted to see them multiple times. One of our challenges became having enough copies of the DVD on hand to keep up with the unanticipated demand from volunteers and other community organizations.
There were three primary objectives for this insert in The Dallas Morning News.
The marketing committee of Circle Ten Council strategically placed this publication by delivering it two days prior to our School Night for Scouting event, allowing us to reach parents with important information about the benefits of having their child involved in the Scouting program. This supplement helped us inform more than 323,000 Dallas Morning News readers about the success of Scouting and the difference we are making in the lives of thousands of young people in our communities. The planning process for this publication began in February, and the publication actually occurred on August 30. The committee had to work to secure more than $27,000 in advertising support from local businesses and community supporters to fund the publication. We also had to write all the copy and secure all the pictures for the publication. The goal was to market this piece to a parent who might not know anything about Scouting. We wanted it to look fun and full of adventure and also be informative.
This publicity piece resulted in hundreds of phone calls from parents interested in getting their kids involved in the Scouting program. The hits on our council Web site increased by more than 1,000, and our School Night for Scouting campaign was a success with more than 8,000 boys joining the Scouting program in a single night. Also, 1,500 adult volunteer leaders joined the Scouting program as well. This marketing piece has also been a great tool for district executives to use when making presentations to large audiences.
This was a big project that took a monumental amount of effort. We were up against the line in securing funding in order to make the project possible. Next year we will begin securing sponsorships earlier and we will also place the piece a little earlier to ensure that all of our audiences receive the message prior to the School Night event.
The idea behind the Star—Learning for Life brochure was "stating the obvious"—that every soul can be a star, and that the beauty of the world we live in is created by many stars (hence the galaxy shots). Also, a very sophisticated/educational approach to corporations was behind the creativity on this.
The Great Salt Lake Council launched an aggressive campaign to expand its Learning for Life program. We evaluated current Learning for Life material, but no items were specific to the Great Salt Lake Council. We met with a member of our finance and marketing committee, and educated him on the program. He caught the vision and wrote the brochure. We then recruited Origin Studios to design the brochure. The combination of these two talents resulted in this quality brochure.
The council has expanded its Learning for Life program from 2,000 to more than 15,000 youth. The brochure is a great tool to tell the Learning for Life story.
The importance of assessing needs, finding the talent, and allowing them to work together and produce an outstanding Learning for Life brochure.
Every year the Heart of America Council hosts an Urban Scouting Barbecue to raise funds for its Scoutreach endeavors. This event has always been well attended and is held in conjunction with the Kansas City Chiefs' "Red Friday." It is held at a premier location in downtown Kansas City, Barney Allis Plaza, and is a good site for both foot traffic and visiting guests. In order to increase attendance from the downtown community in 2005, posters were put up in the five-block radius of the barbecue location.
The hope was to increase attendance, donations, and overall awareness of the event.
The goal was to make the poster look like an event poster and appeal to the urban community. It was designed with the concert-like, Hatch Show Print-inspired feel with the objective of catching the eye of people working downtown every day.
Orange and red were used to complement the Kansas City Chiefs' colors with the hope to also draw attendance from Red Friday fans.
Attendance was increased at the barbecue, and more funds were raised than in previous years. This event is one of the largest events held by the council to benefit urban Scouting programs and it in turn impacts the lives of youth in the Kansas City urban core.
We learned that the more buzz that can be created about an event, the better. The poster cannot be held directly responsible for the increase in attendance; however, it did help to create more awareness about Scouting in the downtown community. It helped to make the event more visual and drew on an audience that might not otherwise have known what was going on. In the future, the goal is to be even more visual, perhaps inviting a radio remote or some other attention-getting device to the area.
The Middle Tennessee Council serves a 37-county area in the heart of the state. This area encompasses the large metropolitan Nashville community, several second-tier cities, and dozens of small towns and rural communities. There are 10,928 adult volunteers involved in the council's Scouting programs, which serve 42,778 youth. These youth represent an ethnically diverse population from a wide range of economic and social circumstances.
The primary objectives of the Eagle Scout Class of 2004 newspaper insert were:
Several secondary objectives were:
The council has a staff member who is responsible for the overall planning and execution of finance and marketing efforts under the general direction of the Scout executive. This staff member works with a variety of agencies that design and execute support pieces throughout the year. All of these agencies have an active involvement on the council's marketing committee.
In conjunction with key anniversaries, every five years, the Middle Tennessee Council has executed an insert in the council's largest newspaper. In anticipation of this insert, the council launched a research project on the Eagle projects conducted that year in August 2004.
Design concepts were given by the council's finance and marketing department to the agency of choice. Initial designs were presented by the agency. The council went through a process of several months with the agency to insure that the story of Scouting in middle Tennessee was told.
The two prior versions of this piece were designed and printed by the newspaper. The vice president of marketing's agency donated the design work. A printer who sits on the marketing committee printed the piece to meet the council's budget after the cost of insertion. The printer certainly donated a great deal of his cost.
In the end, the Eagle Scout Class of 2004 was a quality piece that could be used at multiple events over the next several months.
The collateral piece was met with enthusiastic reviews by many people. In the next week's paper, a letter to the editor was published. Here is an excerpt from Ms. Pat Oglesby's letter:
"I do not know how many of The Tennessean readers looked at the attractive brochure included in the Feb. 6 paper honoring the Eagle Scout Class of 2004. It made my heart glad to see the 196 boys pictured in that beautifully done work of art knowing what goes into the Scouting program. As for the other 122 names appearing without pictures, we can be secure in knowing these fine young men are off to better things."
An increased awareness of the overall Scouting program was created.
Truly, the hard work of so many Scouts and volunteers is worthy of the extensive work it took to plan, develop, and execute this collateral material.
Leveraging the resources of the Boy Scouts of America produced a higher-quality piece.
More than $781,000 worth of donated manpower was contributed to the communities of middle Tennessee through the 2004 Eagle Scout projects. This did not include the estimated cost of materials. The 2005 questionnaire included that question.
The Merits of Marketing (marketing.scouting.org) is a resource for local
councils, developed by the Marketing &
Communications Division of the National Council, Boy Scouts of
America.