Goal: How did you demonstrate that you are committed to advancing diversity in your organization through your marketing?
The vision for this marketing campaign was to use the opening of Presidio Tunnel Tops as a means to discover and connect people to place – to create ownership and a sense of belonging in the national park site experience among our most underrepresented visitors.
More than a decade in the making with breathtaking views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the July 2022 opening of the brand new Presidio Tunnel Tops was a major milestone for one of America’s most visited and beloved national park sites. The revolutionary new parkland was co-designed including community input in the development, so the promotional campaign needed to match the inclusive values and process by inviting people of all backgrounds and perspectives into the messaging process.
We started by defining that diverse and inclusive marketing is marketing that aims to speak to a larger audience of potential consumers by looking past preconceived notions of gender, age, race, income, sexuality, language, and religion (among other things). We then established that our inclusive campaign should be led by the community voices of our identified target audience by featuring people that represent communities that we wanted to visit the park. Before any messaging was created, we started with six listening workshops with the organizations Activators Council and Community Experts, both groups representing the audience we aimed to invite.
From those hands-on workshops we recognized the consumer insight as: “Presidio Tunnel Tops is my place. Where I can explore nature; where I get to immerse in play, adventure and imagination; and, most importantly, where I can connect with my friends and family. It’s free, open-to-all and I can make it my own.”
Initiatives: Describe the promotion. What was your organization’s message and how does it foster diversity? How was the target audience channel developed/pursued?
The consumer insight informed the development of the “Free to Be” campaign, which lets visitors know Presidio is a place they can express their most authentic selves, and reinforces the fact that Presidio is completely free to visit—which we heard is a crucial message for our target audiences. It is translated into Spanish and Simplified Chinese as well.
In promotions, Free to Be shows instead of sells by featuring speci?c stories and experiences of the place and the connections to our target community. User-generated photography showing real visitors is crucial to demonstrate inclusivity, the imagery for Free to Be promotions shows our target audience that people that look like them are already in the park. This means featuring photos of racially diverse visitors, multi-generational groups, and people with disabilities throughout TunnelTops.org, email and social promotions for Presidio Tunnel Tops.
Audience: The greater Bay Area, which includes San Francisco and eight surrounding counties; with specific targeting to low-income households earning less than $99,000, people of color, and people with disabilities — all of whom are traditionally underrepresented among National Park visitors.
Channels: A 360-degree approach defined partner promotion is a foundational channel in addition to traditional owned, earned and paid marketing efforts. To ensure consistency, a partner toolkit was developed and publicly shared at tunneltops.org/project/toolkit. It includes downloadable banner ads, social media assets, and videos for the use of any agency or organization amplifying Free To Be. The budget for paid ads focused on engagement-level strategies including social media and search ads. Media partnerships offered awareness-level tactics such as bus ads, light pole banners and newspaper ads. Owned communication via website, social channels and emails keeps the drumbeat of the invitation by promoting specific events geared toward our target audience.
Results: Please describe how your organization was purposeful in advancing diversity through this initiative. Please describe the metrics you used to judge success. What were the forecasted and actual outcomes described in your Key Performance Indicators (KPI)? What impact did the initiative have on your organization and for your customers?
The goal for paid social promotion was ‘Engage with focused ethnic audiences with a post engagement rate of 2.5% on paid Facebook and Instagram (above the organization benchmark, which was 2.05 %). By segmenting the audiences into Asian-, Latin- and African-American groups we were able to customize photography in the ads to increase relevance. The retargeting campaign showed engagement well above the goal at 4.8% average click-thru rate. As the campaign progresses, we implement weekly optimizations to show real photos of our audience in the space and first-person perspectives to be fresh and relatable.
A crucial channel for this effort is the partners with local agencies and organizations, as trusted word-of-mouth was identified as a way that our audience was motivated. By tracking downloads from the digital toolkit, we measured reach for the partnership messaging channel. In the three month period July-September, 275 materials have been downloaded. These assets range from logos to printable flyers and social media graphics.
Presidio Tunnel Tops required building brand awareness from scratch so we closely tracked unaided awareness as measured by organic search volume has grown exponentially in the months leading up to the opening. Organic search volume in Google has increased 5x between March and July 2022. That has resulted in nearly 8x traffic to TunnelTops.org via search. Compared to our goal of increasing 200%, this is a strong performance that indicates we are reaching our audience.
The impact of this marketing effort is improved equity for a broader community to experience the Presidio by increasing awareness and access to the park. More than 20,000 people attended the Grand Opening weekend, and visitation to regular weekend events is strong among our target audience.
Entry Title
Presidio Tunnel Tops, Free to Be Campaign
Division
Focus - Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Marketing