IUPUI School of Liberal Arts: Spirit & Place
Supporting the 27th Annual Spirit & Place Festival
Earned Media • Paid Digital • Social Media
SPIRIT & PLACE
In the mid 1990’s, Spirit & Place emerged from the Project on Religion and Urban Culture, an initiative of The Polis Center at IUPUI. Today, Spirit & Place still believes in the power of the arts, humanities, and religion to strengthen and build community, foster deeper connections, and heal the world around us. Taking a people-centered approach, Spirit & Place invests time into building authentic relationships, co-creating year-round programming as well as capacity-building opportunities that address and reflect community needs and values. These efforts culminate in their annual festival in the fall with a different overall theme each year.
CAMPAIGN BACKGROUND
The 2022 Festival explored the theme of IDENTIFY. Festival events involved sessions focused on the humanities — history, literature, ethics, etc. — and how it tells us about who has the power to shape how we identify. Other events tackled the theme of religion and how faith informs the way an individual walks in the world. The festival also celebrated the arts through events and works that revealed how we view and think about ourselves as individuals and collectively as members of society. The goal was to determine how we talk about ourselves, our communities, spiritual practices, artistic practices and more through our own identity.
Housed in the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI
Self-funded, radically unique platform based on an ethos of fairness, hospitality, and equity
Celebrating 27 years of bringing authentic themes and events to the people of Indianapolis through their annual festival
Our Process
Step 1 - Messaging
Spirit & Place partnered with Bohlsen Group to help clarify their brand and messaging as an anti-racist organization and increase participation at the 2022 Festival through earned media efforts. Bohlsen Group worked to become experts on Spirit & Place’s unique festival messaging as this was essential to properly communicating between festival event organizers and the media. With written materials, such as press releases, media alerts and contributed articles, Bohlsen Group set out to obtain coverage in order to help Spirit & Place achieve their goals for the 2022 festival.
Step 2 - Tactics
Bohlsen Group understood how significant the topic of IDENTIFY was to the overall purpose of the festival; therefore, our team focused our efforts on promoting the event by disseminating messages to broadcast, radio, print media, online media, calendar listings, blogs, social media, ad placements and more. Festival information was sent to major Indianapolis publications, such as Fox59’s Indy Now, WFYI, The Indianapolis Recorder, and Indianapolis Business Journal. Additionally, our team spent time pitching smaller publications like local newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts to further build awareness of these upcoming events.
Step 3 - Execute
Bohlsen Group worked with Spirit & Place’s direct contact as well as specific festival event organizers to mediate conversations between the organization and media outlets. Other efforts to support this work included both paid digital ad placements and social media content leading up to and during the festival events. While we saw success in our outreach, we did face a number of barriers as we were performing our earned media initiatives. The festival took place right around the same time as the election in Indiana, so we did struggle to reach a handful of reporters who we thought would be interested in covering the event. Had the election not taken place during this time, we believe the reporters would have jumped at the opportunity to write about the festival. We also noticed that some reporters were hesitant to cover some of the more hard-hitting, deep subtopics that were covered within the theme of IDENTIFY, which we believe set our initiatives back as well. While these setbacks were frustrating, Bohlsen Group was able to garner outstanding coverage and listings for the client.
Results
Garnered 83 placements from earned media efforts leading to placement in publications such as WFYI, The Indianapolis Business Journal and Fox59 Indy Now.
Over 11 million potential impressions were earned through coverage.
Paid digital garnered 1,884,669 impressions with over 6,000 engagements.