Red River Mutual
Spruce Up Your Story
The Ask
Every year, Red River Mutual donates $150,000 as part of its community sponsorship initiative, Spruce Up Your Story. Spruce Up Your Story was created to help restore well-used but well-loved community spaces in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. For its fifth year running, Red River Mutual came to the UpHouse PR team to get the word out there when applications opened for the initiative and when the recipients were announced.
The Strategy
Since this initiative involved mostly small town projects, I knew it would be best to emphasize the impact these donations were making on the communities. I decided it would be best to write individual news releases for each of the projects that were receiving the money, complete with tailored quotes from the Red River Mutual spokesperson and the community members who were receiving the money for their project. Once the releases were written, they were sent to targeted lists of journalists in the associated communities.
Results
The outreach resulted in 32 media clippings in several rural and mainstream news outlets. The initiative raised enough attention that Spruce Up Your Story was even praised in a large news outlet on the east coast.
In Closing
This campaign showed how important it is to find the local impact and connection to a story, especially when it comes to corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns. In this day and age, we’re seeing it’s difficult to get media coverage for CSR initiatives because more and more companies are doing them, so you need to emphasize the communities that are impacted in order to break through the noise.
Finding the local impact and having a local spokesperson from the project tied to the release made it all the more newsworthy.
The coverage was able to position Red River Mutual as a leader in these areas, fostering the relationship between the company and the communities it serves.