CASE STUDY

“Telling our story through this campaign will help us engage more new donors and increase community support so we can make an even bigger difference.”

Elyse Hammett, VP of Marketing and Communications at the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta

Community Foundation Awareness Initiative

Building a National Brand for Community Foundations

The Challenge

Community foundations operate in every corner of the U.S. and play a vital role in supporting issues near-and-dear to their regions. With their deep knowledge of local issues and nonprofits, community foundations serve as trusted partners for donors who want to make a difference through giving locally.

Yet community foundations remain a mystery to most Americans — largely because community foundations have not traditionally invested in developing a cohesive, easy-to-understand brand.

Through our work with the Community Foundation Awareness Initiative (CFAI), we hear regularly from community foundation communicators who say this lack of a unified brand is a barrier to them as they look to build support for efforts to address the needs of their regions.

The Solution

Turn Two’s creative team aimed to address this challenge by recruiting a group of more than 40 U.S. community foundations to partner with us to co-develop a brand awareness campaign for the field.

These foundations — a diverse group of large and small foundations that stretched from Alaska to Florida — agreed to invest in the creation of a national campaign that could be localized for use in their home communities. Turn Two developed a comprehensive process that incorporated input from each partner foundation to develop a unique value proposition, identify a target audience persona, create key messages, and develop a series of draft creative concepts. These concepts were then tested by focus groups comprised of prospective community foundation donors.

The end result is a campaign centered on  a simple, yet powerful message: “Community Foundations Make More Possible.”

That concept is now at the center of a nationwide campaign that includes a targeted digital and social media ad buy that is supplemented by local campaigns in the home markets of each of the partner community foundations, which are adapting our creative concept for print and digital advertising, TV and radio ads, billboards, and events.

Campaign Highlights 

  • Real People, Real Impact: The campaign features authentic visuals from community foundations across more than 40 markets. By showcasing real people and communities, each ad includes relevant and engaging examples that resonate with our target audience.

  • Modular Design for Local Impact: While the campaign has a national scope, it empowers local community foundations to adapt the campaign’s creative elements to their specific communities while maintaining a cohesive visual identity. 

  • Storytelling with a Clear Message: The campaign narrative is designed to highlight how community foundations connect donors, nonprofits, and community partners to maximize impact. The goal is to encourage potential donors to understand the critical role of these foundations and to support their work.

Results 

While the campaign is still in its early stages, initial results are incredibly promising.

For the national campaign:

  • Facebook & Instagram ads achieving a click-through rate of more than 3% — an extraordinarily high rate for a campaign of this type.

  • Digital display ads are posting click-through rates that are more than double the industry benchmark.

  • For video ads, more than 63% of viewers are watching the entire ad — well above the target rate of 50%.