Incite - Social Impact Marketing - April Newsletter

At Incite, we interact with a broad range of people and organizations. Our work is interesting, powerful and in some cases life changing. In all our campaigns, we are engaging people, inspiring them to think or believe differently and inciting action to adopt a positive behavior change.
Earlier this month I was fortunate to join a Social Entrepreneurship conference at Indiana University. In addition to speaking about our work, I gleaned key insights from Jill Vialet, CEO and Founder of Playworks a national nonprofit that uses play to help kids succeed in learning.
Jill shared her experience founding Playworks and growing this organization to scale now serving 300 urban schools in 23 cities across the country. In her comments, she hit on several ‘truths’ to effective social impact marketing campaigns that I would summarize as:

• Local leadership is imperative
• Build a model first
• Teach and train your team
• Share the vision to create momentum
• Let change catch hold

In all, Jill’s work in building PlayWorks is parallel to our Incite campaigns. It is all about people, sharing vision and driving action to deliver outcomes; or as we say, Engage People, Inspire Belief, Incite Action.

For example, in March we partnered with USA Funds in a pilot project in New York City. Our purpose was to engage high school students through in-school pep rallies that entertain and equip students with information necessary to complete the FAFSA form as a critical first step toward financial aid. In all, six pep rallies led to engaging over 1,350 students preparing them to embark on the path of securing financial aid.  Stay tuned for our case study recap next month.

In our work with public health, we are in partnership with the Gateway Immunization Coalition to ensure kids in St. Louis are immunized.  The "Kids that Rock" campaign engages parents in vaccine education while featuring photos of their rocker kids on 105.7 The Point's website.  In the process of doing what we do best – marketing campaigns that mobilize communities – we were able to engage 275 families in an online health survey, educate the community about the importance of immunizations and ultimately improve health outcomes.

Beyond the positive community impact of this work, this campaign has been recognized for outstanding contributions in local health practice through the National Association of County & City Health Officials and will be featured at the National Conference of Immunization and Health Related Coalitions conference in May as a model for public/private partnerships.

In addition to our campaigns, we are working to share our knowledge equipping others with tools and resources to be effective social impact marketers. In San Diego, Matt Scelza and Nick Cavarra presented our latest White Paper, “6 Pillars of Effective Cause Marketing” at the American Marketing Association conference. This paper shares practical tips on designing effective cause marketing campaigns and was well received by the audience of corporate and nonprofit stakeholders. (download now)

We hope you will join us in continuing to support social impact marketing campaigns that Engage People, Inspire Belief and Incite Action.

Thank you,

Sarah Harris

Founder, Incite