Making the Public Aware of Our Public Awareness Campaign

North Texas’ KnoWhat2Do campaign teaches residents to prepare for the worst. We had spent the better part of 2008 and 2009 creating tools to provide the details of how, and when to prepare for disasters in North Texas. Now, the time had come to start promoting these tools to the public at large.

Marketing with Constraints Makes You Stronger

Working with the government can be tough, mostly from a scheduling and planning aspect. It can take months to get the funding through all the red-tape. That’s okay, our proposal was flexible enough to allow us to adjust the ad placements even a year after our initial proposal was accepted. The downside? We had to perform a year’s worth of service in just three months! We felt like an emergency response marketing team. To do it, we stuck with a classic strategy of outdoor and radio marketing while introducing cinema advertising to the mix. We pulled it off.

One of our goals for the campaign was to track the specific effectiveness of each media placement. Just because we had a big budget to work with didn’t mean we shouldn’t measure what worked and what didn’t. So we integrated specific web landing pages for each ad message. Some of the landing pages were even personalized to match the county. By adding analytics, we were able to determine the success of each campaign component while supporting new ideas and concepts to improve upon next time.

Personally Engaging Our Community

With an important program like Knowhat2Do, you can’t just toss out ad messages to the general public and expect residents to jump into action. TFG and KnoWhat2Do are in this for the long-haul, and we know that real progress can only be made by reinforcing our ad messages with real, genuine community involvement. That’s where our strategic partner, Erin Steed with Steed Creative comes in. She joined our team and helped us champion the KnoWhat2Do brand. We created annual events like PrepareFair, created speaking engagements, gained press coverage, solicited corporate partners, and reached out to the local media. Also, Dallas/Fort Worth’s beloved weather guy, Troy Dungan, has become the face of the program and we are adding more and more supporters everyday. Erin is helping us grow those personal relationships with the voices of the community. Follow KnoWhat2Do on Twitter to see the type of street level awareness we’re building.

Every Little Bit Helps, but More is needed
We accomplished a lot in our three-month marketing blitzcrieg, but more is needed to reach the public. More is coming. So stay tuned!
BTW, make an emergency plan and build an emergency kit.