Our community at Toronto’s Cause Marketers Meetup continues to grow. Once again, we had a sold out event last Wednesday, full of both new and returning faces. Here is a list of some of the organizations that were in the room:
- Butterfly Communities
- Canadian Centre for Financial Literacy
- Creative Trust
- Culture Days
- For Youth Initiative
- Kids Help Phone
- Ontario 211 Services Corporation
- Rethink Breast Cancer
- The Theatre Centre
- United Church of Canada
Our presenters last week were Farah Ng and Meghann Comerford from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) Foundation. Earlier this year, I had witnessed their ‘Toronto’s Most Life Changing Address’ campaign all over the city, in print and online and was keen to hear more about their integration of traditional and new media channels.
Farah and Meghann walked us through the planning and implementation of the CAMH Foundation campaign and were kind enough to share their slides here:
I was very interested in some of the communications realities/challenges that led to the approach of their real estate development-themed campaign:
- Many people don’t know what CAMH is (a hospital) due to ‘Centre’ in the name.
- The stigma associated with mental health is an ongoing issue.
- In Toronto, the facility address itself, ’99 Queen W’ carries stigma and negative associations.
- This lack of understanding and stigma can lead to apathy in their key audiences.
To avoid tune out, CAMH Foundation played on a subject that is hot in Toronto and in the local neighbourhood: real estate development. Through a two-phase teaser/reveal approach, the campaign piqued interest in the ‘1001 Queen’ address through transit shelter ads, radio, construction hoarding and even a model suite. The facility’s revitalization efforts and need for support was then revealed through:
- banner ads
- social media
- transit ads
- magazine and newspaper advertising
- public relations
- Queen St. site hoarding
- PATH and subway advertising
The result was an increased awareness of the positive changes happening at CAMH as well as a number of marketing communications lessons learned (many will be addressed in CAMH Foundation’s fall campaign):
- Human stories would have further increased impact.
- Radio was much more effective than transit advertising.
- While social media did worked in their favour, in future, they will use it more proactively.
- Targetting trade publications (real estate and marketing) was a successful approach, avoiding competing for the same media with other awareness campaigns.
- While banners directed more traffic, these visitors didn’t stay on the site long.
- Sponsored tweets were hard to sift out for the purpose of measurement and weren’t necessarily as targetted.
Next up for CAMH Foundation: building on the relationships established in the spring with their fall campaign. We’ll be watching and thank you again for sharing, Farah and Meghann!
