ShareSpirit & Place Festival 2011
The Body
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Client: The Spirit & Place Festival is a community project managed by The Polis Center, part of the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. Spirit & Place stimulates conversation, community building and action through collaboration among arts, religious and civic organizations. More than 15,000 people are annually engaged throughout central Indiana in dozens of programs presented by more than 100 organizations. This year marked its 16th season.
Challenge: Continuing to maintain a faithful following while interacting with and capturing a new audience is the yearly challenge for The Spirit & Place Festival. With a scarce budget for marketing and advertising, Bohlsen Group was challenged to find and implement alternative methods to reach the public and create successful events for the festival in its entirety.
Solution: Bohlsen Group created strategic advance publicity and promotions campaigns that focused on several types of media outlet connections including a major emphasis on traditional earned media and social media. With more than 20 years of experience in the field, we were able to utilize our longstanding relationships with our media partners to garner coverage.
We distributed a content-rich overview press release along with several angle-specific press releases to local, regional and national media. We hand-delivered Spirit & Place brochures and booklets, highlighting events that would be of interest to each of our media partners. Bohlsen Group coordinated the Keep Indianapolis Beautiful book donations to area schools while constructing a human-interest press release to follow. From an online and social media standpoint, Bohlsen Group performed outreach to statewide and national specialty web sites and strategic bloggers. We pitched calendar listings, links, and feature stories as appropriate through phone and e-mail follow-up. Bohlsen Group constructed numerous tweets and multiple re-tweets for the numerous Spirit & Place events and helped promote festival “Body Blurbs” through Twitter and Facebook. We worked with media and festival sponsors, including WFYI, JCC and Madame Walker Theatre.
Results: We secured more than 70 publication placements with a total circulation/audience reach of millions. Highlights included the Indianapolis Star, Louisville Courier-Journal, NUVO (front page), Lafayette Journal and Courier, Terre Haute Tribune-Star, FOX 59, WTHR, WFYI, WISH-TV online, Butler Collegian, Indianapolis Recorder, Indy Spectator, Indianapolis Business Journal and WIBC radio.