Case Study: Integrated PR Tactics, Internal Communications Help Pay It Forward for ESPN’s Rise Up – Give Back! Campaign

At the Boston Rise Up - Give Back! event, youngsters from the Head Start center performed a special cheer for the ESPN Rise Up volunteers and the student athletes involved in the program.  Photo courtesy of ESPN

Company: ESPN

Timeframe: July - October 2011

Schools across America have been suffering from budget cuts that severely limit their ability to offer sports and physical education to their students. To help call attention to this trend, ESPN produced a documentary series in 2011, Rise Up, which shined a spotlight on four communities—impoverished areas of Wellston, Ohio, Chicago, Boston and Seattle—that suffered from such cuts. In the show, the sports network and its local partners worked together to provide state-of-the-art high school athletic facilities—a la Extreme Makeover.

ESPN also wanted to go one step further than the classic “reveal moment.” Team ESPN, the company’s corporate outreach arm, organized the Rise Up – Give Back! volunteer program as an extension of the  Rise Up series. The Give Back program would help teach students to “pay it forward” by returning the good deed to children in their local community through volunteerism and the construction of play spaces for community youth. The athletes featured on each market’s show would join a host of volunteers to renovate playgrounds for local nonprofits so that young people could have a clean and safe environment in which to play.

MARKET INTEGRATION

Kevin Martinez, senior director of corporate outreach at ESPN, says the main communications goal was to implement a 360 degree campaign in three markets—Chicago, Ohio and Boston (based on time constraints, Seattle was not included)—to deliver key message points through traditional external, online and TV media, social media and internally at ESPN.

“In our line of business, it’s easy to execute a volunteer event or a grant, but that’s episodic and doesn’t last. We wanted to demonstrate that giving needs to ripple throughout the community,” says Martinez.

In June 2011, a team of five ESPN community outreach and communications pros strategized on how to maximize media exposure for the three local market events. “For us, the campaign was a way of piggybacking on the Rise Up series’ preexisting media success in each market,” says Ben Cafardo, senior publicist for ESPN. “We tried to carry that brand-name value that the series built and use that in pitching the media.”

The multi-stage program included partnerships with distribution affiliates Time Warner Cable, Verizon and AT&T,each of which would inspire student athletes to pay it forward in the communities that gave them a second chance in sports, supporting Team ESPN’s motto—“Fans Helping Fans.” Other community outreach messaging included:

• The Reveal: The theme “the reveal is just the beginning” was part of the overall strategy, but also part of its messaging in each market.

• Citizenship: Inspire students to encourage each other to appreciate the importance of leadership and citizenship within their community by leading a legacy activity for the benefit of others.

• Pay it Forward: Reinforce the leadership proposition by influencing teen athletes to be more productive.

• Let’s Move: Focus on the importance of health and wellness through exercise and being active, with an emphasis on student athletes being the inspiration among all students and local youths.

LOUD AND CLEAR

With the events scheduled for Sept. 13 (Ohio), Sept. 27 (Boston) and Oct. 4 (Chicago), Team ESPN began to execute its media relations strategy. A major press release distributed a week before the first event detailed the overall campaign, and media advisories were delivered for each market three days before its event.

The team then spent the two days before hammering the local markets—grassroots media relations, as Cafardo puts it—calling local papers and news broadcasts (especially the sister ABC affiliates), and philanthropic and hyper-local blogs.

EVENT ACTIVATION

Team ESPN worked with its parent company, The Walt Disney Company, to sponsor three Imagination Playgrounds to advance Disney’s Magic of Healthy Living initiative with KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit dedicated to inspiring play for America’s children.

Team ESPN, in conjunction with the corporate partners, activated volunteers in each market, including high school athletes, school administrators and coaches, to renovate local play spaces.

ESPN called upon its relationships with ESPN talent, local professional athletes and outside celebrities (NFL pro Jarrett Walter Payton, Walter Payton’s son, in Ohio, and NBA legend Cedric Maxwell in Boston) to raise media interest, while Cafardo and the team prepared message points and helped the representatives from sponsors prepare their speeches at each event.

In addition, roundtable discussions for the athletes and coaches were created to help reinforce citizenship and athlete safety. All three play spaces were refurbished in just one day of work, and a KaBOOM! Imagination Playground was donated by athletes and affiliates as a new piece to encourage creative play.

Following each event, the team contributed to the public-facing ESPN corporate blog, ESPNfrontrow.com, filing compelling stories promoting the event complete with photo and video galleries (which they also supplied to on-site media for their coverage).

INTERNAL REVEAL

Internally telling the story about why giving back is a part of the business model is also important for ESPN (see the sidebar) and its partners.

“Not only do we aim for traditional external, online and TV media, we’re also thinking about incorporating social media, utilizing ESPNfrontrow.com and feeding our internal site, ESPN In the Know,” says Cafardo, who recapped events for ITK with quotes and comments from Martinez and the principals from the local schools, among others.

ESPN’s partners launched their own internal communications campaigns about the work being done. “For us, that’s important because we want them to know that Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon are talking about their relationship with ESPN as a productive model,” says Martinez.

Additionally, the @TeamESPN Twitter handle was activated for a steady flow of news nuggets leading up to each event, with photos and news coverage posted after the events.

EARNING IT

Martinez says the biggest challenge of the campaign was communicating the “pay it forward” story to the athletes and the coaches.

“It’s not enough to give a community a new gym,” says Martinez. “We had to tell them that you have to work for what you want in your community—and that task was different for each market because each had different social norms and objectives.”

Martinez regrets not being able to do a Give Back event in the markets of all four shows. “We needed at least six weeks to organize each event, and the way that the programming happened, we couldn’t do Seattle—where I’m from—so that was disappointing,” says Martinez. The markets they did reach, however, yielded the following results:

• Program integration with the Rise Up documentary series—including Give Back! coverage in each episode and ESPN3 online video of the volunteer events—reached 6 million viewers.

• Team ESPN received community outreach recognition in six total placements from local media, including print, online and television. Local ABC affiliates in Ohio and Chicago shot TV news stories, while the Boston affiliate ran an online video news story. The Boston Neighborhood News Network (BNN) TV station also covered the event.

• Team ESPN and affiliates collaborated to activate more than 400 volunteers across the U.S.

• The more than 2 million unique visitors to ESPNFrontrow.com and ESPNRise.com have generated significant exposure for ESPN’s partners.

The Rise Up – Give Back! volunteer program wrapped in 2011, but the campaign was a prime example of a successful integration of a broadcast TV program with hyper-local community outreach that truly makes a difference. PRN

CONTACT:

Ben Cafardo, [email protected]; Kevin Martinez, [email protected]; Tracy Zampaglione, [email protected].

Follow Bill Miltenberg: @bmiltenberg