Staying IN Campaign

The McKinley Avenue Agency

A cross-platform, semester-long campaign with the end goal to raise awareness about the benefits of staying in Indiana after graduation for Ball State graduates.

For this campaign, I was the project lead. I wrote the proposal, managed multiple divisions on their work, acted as the account director, was the head editor for the website and all creative designs.

The Proposal

This campaign began with a proposal. The agency was first approached by the Ball State Office of Government Affairs and Engagement asking for a student-created campaign that pertains to the Brain Drain issue in Indiana.

I created the campaign and lead the brainstorming sessions that developed the main campaign idea, Staying IN.

The Branding Guide

I worked with the designer on the branding guide.

The purpose of this branding guide was to keep the campaign within the same theme, lots of people worked on design for this and it was important to keep consistent messaging from the colors used to the way copy was worded.

The Survey

My team developed a beginning survey to collect data on the current perceptions of the audience's views of Indiana.

We then used the results to determine the focus of the campaign. A large majority of the survey respondents identified nature to be important to them, so we focused the campaign on the parks and outdoor views in Indiana.

The survey received over 500 respondents, 10% of our target audience.

The Website

The campaign included an aggregate website to highlight a collection of other Indiana resources. The point of the website was to show how easy it is to find information on living in Indiana and to encourage college students to consider life in the state.

I made executive decisions on design, copy and structure.

The Paid Media Plan

The campaign incorporated a mix of paid, earned and owned media. The paid media campaign incorporated multi-channel promotions across streaming services, social media and website traffic.

I developed the plan for when to publish what and managed the project for each promotional piece to run at the proper time.

The Video Ad

I wrote the copy and supported the multimedia team in the development of this ad that ran on Hulu for a few months and was featured on the Instagram account.

The Instagram

An Instagram account was developed to reach the target audience of college graduates. The plan for the account was to focus on the great aspects of Indiana and sharing information in trending Gen Z language.

The SnapChat

Gen Z and the target audience used SnapChat as one of their primary forms of social media. To reach the audience, a SnapChat account was created with various filters relating to the campaign goals. A few filters had over 200K uses.

The Results

This campaign is continuing to run. From my time running the campaign, the audience reach was over 30K individuals across three key platforms