The Heartbeat of Plymouth Festival is held annually in Plymouth, Michigan. Organized and sponsored by 5 community churches its intent is to create a bridge between different faiths by focusing on the core beliefs of each faith. The festival features Christian music, inspirational speakers, community service projects, as well as children and teen activities.
Photography | Tom Libertiny
The volunteer organization has done excellent work creating content, activities, and hiring musical artists for entertainment. It’s a great example of volunteers working together at the grass-roots level to organize a unique event.
Challenge | Awareness
For many events, especially those in the early stages of a multi-year endeavour, community awareness was a challenge for the organizers.
Photography | Tom Libertiny
Strategy | Awareness Through Focus
For the 2015 festival, I teamed up with the event organizers to develop an awareness strategy. Because the festival is intentionally broad-based so that there’s something for everyone across all age groups, I recommended selecting music as the focal point for awareness because it’s something everyone has in common–love for music.
Campaign | Christian Music
Our team created a centralized website from which the members of each participating church as well as media could find compelling content to promote the event through social media and traditional media (Examples: newspaper, radio, and TV).
Next we worked with the local artists and the talent agencies representing the national acts who were scheduled to perform to create a compelling video promotion. The video was placed on YouTube and the festival’s website so that it could be easily shared via social media.
Campaign | Post-festival
Our team then attended the festival and captured photographs and video. We created a post festival See You Next Year video with highlights from the 2015 festival. This was the final piece of our strategy and was effectively used via social media as a reminder about how much fun this year’s festival was and that next year’s festival (2016) was right around the corner.
Results | Awareness Noticeably Increased.