Temple Street Foundation raises awareness and funds to enable Temple Street Children’s University Hospital to continue to provide world-class care to Ireland’s sickest children.
Background:
After years of attracting well known Irish celebrities, high profile Irish musicians, and rugby & soccer heroes to become ambassadors for Temple Street, this very special Foundation was still yet to have a high profile Irish Golfer as an ambassador.
With the Irish Open taking place in May 2015 in Northern Ireland and 5 top Irish Golfers playing on home turf as well as thousands of domestic and international eyes on Ireland, we saw this as an opportunity to gently remind the golfers of the importance of the hospitals existence.
Challenge:
How do you gain the attention of these guys & target them days before the competition when their focus is on the game?
Insight:
Just like golfers who face challenges in their sport, our little champions face challenges too… and like successful golfers they don’t give up.
Objectives:
Our primary objective was to get any of the top 5 Irish golfers to tweet us and ultimately get one of the golfers to say they would come visit the kids with the ultimate aim of becoming a supporter who would help raise money to buy life saving equipment.
A secondary objective was to raise vital awareness of the hospital; eliciting a positive public response toward this special charity.
Strategy:
The strategy was to reach out to the golfers with a video message from our little champions to some big ones who know a thing or two about facing challenges.
Target audience:
Primary audience was the Irish golfers playing in the tournament, secondary was golf supporters, key media influences as well as the broader general public, all adults male and female.
We seeded the video through Twitter and Facebook two days before the event.
The success of the planning and execution was reliant, not only on the story but on how we used social to amplify the content. We knew that the golfers would likely be on a social media ban 24 hours before the tournament so we were strategic in our timing and our first social post was on Temple Street Twitter page and then we personally tweeted each of the golfers, just in time to connect with them before they teed off.
The Stats:
Success was measured by the number of video views, shares, re-tweets, mentions in the media, overall exposure, and the sentiment generated towards Temple Street. But, most importantly, success would be a personal response and visits from an Irish golfer.
Overall summary of results via EARNED MEDIA. No paid media investment.
• 13,000 Youtube views
• Trended on Twitter in Ireland
• Twitter generated 3,749 page visits & 196 new followers
• Top mention on Twitter was from Brian O’Driscoll and this earned 2552 engagements
• In one week Twitter reached 138K
• Tweeted by celebrities such as Cecelia Ahern, Brian O’Driscoll, Lee Westwood, Bressie and Kodaline
• Over the main 4 day period we had 10K mentions 667 unique authors and 6223 shared mentions
• Original mentions had a potential of reaching 4,411,568 people between May 24th and June 2nd.
• In the same time frame, those mentions spread to 1,741,516 additional people via Retweets and Shares.
• Video went viral to the USA and was shown on Morning Drive, NBC Golf Show • Strong media coverage, including Irish Times, Belfast Telegraph, RTE, Daily Irish Mail, Irish Independent. TodayFM, Newstalk, and Spin
• 1,467’s Facebook likes, over 1,000 shares and 125,000 video impressions
• 63,000 people reached on Facebook
• Media exposure worth €24K
With an investment of €5,000 and earned media worth €24,000 that is a ROI of 400%. This generated considerable awareness, positive conversation and goodwill towards Temple Street.
We achieved our objectives, one of which was to get at least one of the Irish golfers to tweet. Ultimately Graeme McDowell, Shane Lowry, and Padraig Harrington all reacted to the piece.
And the final objective was to get a golfer to agree to visit the hospital and we managed to do that too.
Please view our video case study and other NBC golf video to see the earned media achieved and responses.
