Greater Twin Cities United Way Action Day OOH Campaign

Non-profit

Greater Twin Cities United Way Action Day, Out-of-Home Campaign

The Greater Twin Cities United Way is a nonprofit organization that hosts an annual event called Action Day. The purpose is to bring together people from across the community to pack backpacks for students in need so they can start the new school year confidently and with the supplies they need. Collective Measures was tapped to create a out-of-home campaign that both generated awareness and targeted the right audience for participation.

Traditional Media

The Challenge

Generate awareness for the annual “Action Day” while attracting the right audience

The Greater Twin Cities United Way engaged Collective Measures to grow awareness and volunteer participation for its Action Day event across the Twin Cities. The nonprofit organization harnesses the power of human kindness throughout the Twin Cities to help all people reach their full potential. Action Day, an annual event, brings together people from across the community to pack backpacks for students in need so they can start the new school year confidently and with the supplies they need.

While generating awareness for this event is critical to achieving United Way’s supplies goals, recruiting the right attendees is essential to making the event a success. Faced with the challenge of building awareness among potential volunteers across the Twin Cities while keeping media efficient, Collective Measures explored opportunities to effectively spread United Way’s message.

The solution

We took a data-driven approach to narrow in on the best OOH options

Tasked with generating targeted awareness to drive efficient attendance within a specific geography, out of home (OOH) was selected to help drive awareness and generate event attendance. Collective Measures evaluated several OOH tactics and considered nonprofit pricing opportunities, supplier minimums, and creative lead times for each to ensure the recommended tactics offered the most efficient reach. Through careful evaluation of several options, Collective Measures took a data-driven approach to narrow in on the best OOH options for United Way.

The selected plan included a mix of static posters and digital bulletins to drive awareness with coverage across key Twin Cities metro locations, including along commuter routes. As the event was open to everyone, it was important to run media placements that weren’t too narrow and could reach a variety of audiences. The static options offered wide coverage for key urban, suburban, and rural community members, who were all among United Way’s targets to attend their event. The static tactics also allowed United Way to reach people who weren’t actively searching for event information or in the usual target audience, helping to grow the event to include new attendees.

Digital boards were also recommended due to their ability for over-delivery and flexibility with dates, ensuring ads could run right up to United Way’s event date to generate as much buzz as possible. Together, these tactics provided broad reach while keeping spend efficient.

The results

Helped generate nearly 2 million impressions for United Way’s Action Day

Collective Measures’ use of highly viewable and targeted OOH placements led to increased awareness of United Way’s event, delivering over 1.9M impressions and allowing United Way to achieve its attendance goals. The OOH mix offered the best balance of reach via high impression volume and efficiency with a lower cost per thousand impressions (CPM):

Static boards and digital bulletins generated 144K additional impressions per week per unit due to their unit size and location(s), which provided a 34x higher impression volume per week
Digital boards delivered 160K added-value impressions above what was originally planned