BeeCause was a campaign by an organization to raise money for honeybees and the arts through an art exhibition and auction. It used both traditional and social media to engage artists, attract media attention, cultivate sponsors, and excite the community. The results included over $9,000 in fundraising and increased website traffic and social media engagement. Key lessons learned were around using a strategic multi-media approach, building momentum over time, and focusing content and interactions.
Good morning – I’m really excited to be here today, I’m participating as a presenter and a learner. My name is Liisa Sheldrick, I’m the Communications Strategist and Honey Design, here in London. I’m a relative Newbie when it comes to social media; but having graduated from Western’s Media Information and Technoculture program And working in Public Relations and Marketing Communications for almost a decade, I am an enthusiastic experimenter. As you can see, I’m going to try to cover the lessons learned from our experience with BeeCause in our short time this morning.
Let’s get right to it – how many of you are familiar with the BeeCause event that took place earlier this year? It was a great experiment for us in using all of our team’s strengths and talents. It is also perfect for today: We engaged the arts community, used social media and online tools for promotion and community building And also used traditional media – PR, Advertising and Promotions to build a successful campaign.
Here are a few concepts we can all relate to. Challenges in promoting and marketing in the Arts.
With my traditional PR background, I have to mention that there are strengths in leveraging traditional media.
But, as a social media newcomer and enthusiast, I can see the inherent advantages in leveraging the tools available online.
So, for those of you who didn’t already know about BeeCause, here’s a short synopsis of what we decided to do.
Like any strategic communications campaign, we started with the basics – what are our goals, what do we need to do to achieve our goals, And what tactics will we use to get there.
We needed to engage Artists: Call for Entries – sent to all arts organizations, galleries, publications, websites we could find. It was also posted on our website and distributed through the online community, Akimbo. Akimbo: Toronto-based company Established in November, 1999 promotes contemporary visual art, video, new media and film locally, nationally and internationally via the internet subscriber base of more than 7,400 Canadian and international media and visual arts professionals client base of some of the country's most important galleries, museums, art institutions and film and video festivals.
We wanted to attract Media attention. I know today is all about Social Media, but in our experience we knew that success for Us would include a combination of new media and traditional media exposure. But we used Social Media to engage traditional media, Journalists, reporters and producers, who are also actively using the online space to do their job better.
We also knew that success would include generating financial support for our event. Once we got to the stage when we were Ready to start asking for donations – of money or product – we knew that we had built a credible event that sponsors would Be proud to be associated with. Our strong brand would add value to theirs. And we were smart about who we approached. The Bee theme did lend itself to some natural partners, you could say…
Finally, we used Guerilla marketing techniques that are cheap, easy and translate well from the real world to cyberspace. (I studied the internet in the late 90’s, so I still say cyberspace) When we posted stickers all over downtown, we took pictures with our cameras and then posted the photos on Facebook, asking our fans where they’d seen the stickers. Same thing with the donated Outdoor ads we were given by Pattison, when the BeeShirts arrived from Fresh Ink and we all of course had to try them on (we’re an office of all women!) . I’d snap a photo and post it whenever we could. And, we’d tweet and post updates on Facebook whenever anything was happening.
We saw positive results in all areas of our Goals and Objectives. Did we run a perfect campaign? Can’t say we did. I will always look back and Identify areas for improvement next time. But, we tried to do things differently and we experimented with online tools that were really pretty Foreign to us at the time. And, the results really are nothing to be ashamed of…
In traditional media we received coverage from all the targets we were hoping for, in varying degrees.
Online we say Website Traffic – over 4,400 visits, 45% return visits and 14,905 Webpage Views We had submissions from artists from across Canada – 70 different artists sent in over 140 pieces of work. We would have been happy with 100 pieces to select 20 for auction from. Tweets and Retweets from many friends and followers on twitter. Over 237 Twitter Followers Facebook Updates – Facebook is the one area where I really think we could have done a better job. 64 Facebook Fans
And, finally, the event. We had a great night. The party was fun and The Arts Project was at capacity.
So, here you can see the traditional media, facebook activity tweets all impact traffic on our site. And we were very pleased with the results.