Pensacola & Perdido Bays Estuary Program launch campaign to get locals involved in protecting local waterways.
The Challenge
How do you educate and inspire locals to get involved in protecting local estuaries in ways that are easy and impactful?
The Approach
We partnered with a local public relations team to launch a multi-pronged campaign that was anchored by an all-new, custom website dedicated to educating locals on how simple lifestyle changes can change and shape the future of estuaries in their backyards.
Protecting the places you live & love.
The Pensacola & Perdido Bay Estuary Program is dedicated to preserving our waterways, improving water quality, and restoring natural habitats in the places we live. With a dedicated team of scientists and a whole bunch of volunteers, the work they do on a daily basis is making the difference in an area of the US that is fragile and susceptible to weather impacts.
But they had arrived at a real elephant in the room type problem. How do we get the entire community involved? If many hands make light work, the real magic happens when you have all of the citizens in a local city pitching in to make a difference. So they reached out to us to help us come up with a campaign to get the word out that we called Estuary 101.
This new educational awareness campaign was focused around getting everyone pitching in from pledges and volunteering to financial donations and business partnerships.
We sat down with the leadership team at the Pensacola & Perdido Bays Estuary Program to determine the best way to get locals and businesses chipping in with small steps toward protecting and preserving our local estuaries.
The fear that kept popping up is that the barrier to entry seemed too daunting in the past. If locals feel like their lifestyle changes are too extreme, they simply won’t do them. We needed to develop a plan that was easy enough for people to adopt into their daily routines while still making a big enough impact. Estuary 101 was the banner that this whole campaign would run under.
The Pensacola & Perdido Bays Estuary Program already had a solid logo featuring a pelican with blue and green hues found in the estuaries. We needed a logo that would enhance what existed while still being strong enough to stand on its own.
The Estuary 101 shield sent a clear message that this was an effort to defend and protect what is precious and delicate. The colors band together to illustrate a perpetual, natural coexistence within the estuaries that, with your help, will never be broken. This shield could also be pulled out as an icon to be used across collateral.
One of the main goals of the campaign was to develop and roll out a fundraising platform. Estuary 101 was, at it’s heart, the perfect way to tie in the message of ‘every action counts’ and build not only individual, lower-tier fundraising opportunities, but corporate ones as well.
We worked with their team to develop the levels(with creative, on-brand names for each), gifts at each tier, and both digital and traditional collateral to bring this to market. This resulted in an easy-to maintain and grow way of gathering one-time donations and recurring revenue for the program.
Everyone loves swag, and the Estuary 101 campaign was going to need plenty of it. Locals were encouraged to win swag in several ways, including “Taking the Pledge” to reduce single use plastic use, leaving only footprints in estuaries, not pouring oils or fats down drains, and growing a bay friendly yard. These small lifestyle changes would count as major wins for the health of the estuaries. You could also become an “Estuary Explorer.” By visiting predetermined estuary locations, people could submit proof of their explorations through the Estuary 101 website in exchange for stickers and tote bags.
We got to work with custom illustrations to create must-have swag that people would actually use, creating more exposure for the program. Incentivizing Estuary 101 has been the difference maker so far in getting locals and businesses involved in a big way.
Everyone loves swag, and the Estuary 101 campaign was going to need plenty of it. Locals were encouraged to win swag in several ways, including “Taking the Pledge” to reduce single use plastic use, leaving only footprints in estuaries, not pouring oils or fats down drains, and growing a bay friendly yard. These small lifestyle changes would count as major wins for the health of the estuaries. You could also become an “Estuary Explorer.” By visiting predetermined estuary locations, people could submit proof of their explorations through the Estuary 101 website in exchange for stickers and tote bags.
We got to work with custom illustrations to create must-have swag that people would actually use, creating more exposure for the program. Incentivizing Estuary 101 has been the difference maker so far in getting locals and businesses involved in a big way.
The website was where everything needed to live for Estuary 101. It had to be educational and visually engaging so that people could get excited about the program and be eager to learn more and get involved.
The result was a custom-built site that was simple to navigate and packed with call to action moments that made taking the next step easier than ever before. And since submission forms were plentiful, we set the team at Pensacola & Perdido Bays Estuary Program up for success with seamless notifications and a backend that was simple to update.
