• by John Gaffney , June 1, 2003

It's not often that an independent agency rolls out results on any campaign that involves pro bono work. But a recently wrapped campaign by Salt Lake City-based boede & partners is being touted as a lesson in the power of proper campaign positioning.

The campaign involved boede's work for the Utah Foster Care Foundation. The Foundation needed to increase the profile of its cause and try to drive more actual interest in the process of foster care adoption. Foster care is often misunderstood as a process by which families permanently adopt children from broken homes. That's not the case. Foster care adoption involves adopting children from broken homes until their parent or parents can receive the proper help to put a home back together. According to Utah Foster Care community relations coordinator Deborah Lindner, 75 percent of all foster children are successfully reunited with their original family.

So the goal, as developed by boede, was to reach out to the proper type of target audience. Rather than run outdoor and newspaper campaigns that showed hurt children, it specifically aimed target messages at working class and higher income families. It wanted to increase the amount of interest in foster care and increase the profile quality of families interested so they would result in more actual adoptions.

The main tactic was outdoor advertising. Inside Salt Lake City as well as on the access roads to and from, boede placed billboards that went heavy on the message about foster care. Taglines included "Think carpool lane, "Have more happy meals" and "Children run better with a good set of bearings." The ads were tagged with the Utah Foster care logo but there was no specific call to action. Nor were any pictures of children used to elicit emotion.

"We felt like the idea was to hit the message really strong," said boede managing partner Lori Feld Steele. "We didn't want to do anything too slick. We just wanted to remind the right profile of people about foster care while they were in the car."

Next came newspaper display ads. These were aimed at empty nesters - older Salt Lake City dwellers and those outside the city that had kids at one time but now had them move on to college or beyond. One of the executions there: a picture of an empty swing with the tagline "a kinder gentler savings bond."

Most pro bono work is carried out with a good measure of good will and gratitude. But here the experience helped both the client and the agency. Utah Foster Care received a 20 percent life so far this year in initial interest calls for foster care adoptions. That's 365 potential kids that will be placed, according to Lindner. Steele said boede learned some tings as well.

"We identified all the areas for targeting ahead of time," she said. "We aimed at the right person in the right location. We also laid out the plan so there was no duplication among the outdoor and newspaper message or audience. We did everything just a little differently."

The campaign will be rolled out to TV in the fall.