Local Non-Profit
Strategic Marketing
We’re feeding their dreams.
Strategic Marketing Case Study
Client
Serving Our Kids Foundation
Location
Southern Nevada
Project Brief
Serving Our Kids (SOK) is on the front line in the ongoing fight to end child food insecurity in Southern Nevada. There are 113,000 food-insecure children in Clark County alone.
Every week during the school year, SOK provides weekend meal bags that help feed more than 4,000 elementary and middle school students – children who leave school on Friday not knowing if they will eat again until Monday.
This small, driven, fiercely dedicated non-profit relies entirely on donations and grants to sustain and grow its operations. Almost all of its staff and workers, including its CEO, are volunteers.
Each year, the Henderson, Nevada, Chamber of Commerce Foundation sponsors Leadership Henderson, an intensive, nine-month program dedicated to educating and empowering effective community leaders. The Leadership Henderson Class of 2024 selected SOK as its community service project.
Class member Virginia Martino, BRAND’s Founder and CEO, volunteered our team to help develop and execute a comprehensive, five-year marketing plan, which included integrated advertising and PR campaigns designed to explode community awareness of SOK’s mission and significantly increase participation and donations from individuals and businesses.
Strategic Branding Session
We began by leading a Strategic Branding Session with SOK staff, board members, advisors and key Leadership Henderson and BRAND team members.
This two-day deep dive assessed the foundation’s:
• Short- and long-term objectives
• Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• Current and prospective donors and sponsors
• Competition for donations and grants, and more
Together, we determined where the SOK brand was and where it wanted to go in the future. Next, we identified the key differentiators and brand attributes would become SOK’s brand DNA, core identity and core beliefs – the foundation of its first comprehensive brand strategy.
Finally, we brainstormed the marketing and communication strategies, tactics, storylines and messages to catapult SOK to market prominence, and jumpstart a fundraising engine to power expanded operations and sustained growth.
Marketing Plan
Based on the outcomes of the Strategic Branding Session, exhaustive research and close collaboration with Leadership Henderson class members and key strategic partners, BRAND led the creation of a five-year Strategic Marketing Plan.
This detailed roadmap empowers SOK to achieve its critical objectives: an exponential increase in community awareness, committed individual and institutional donors, and fundraising performance that ensures long-term financial sustainability.
The plan was fully budgeted and designed to be implemented in phases as specific funding milestones are reached.
Hungry kids dream of food.
Creative Strategy
Most kids dream of the future, what it will be like and how they will make their dreams come true. Hungry kids dream of food. Their future is all about their next meal. The SOK campaign depicts these two different dreams. The dream of getting enough to eat and the dream of reaching her or his future potential.
The basic images feature six diverse kids dressed as adults in the careers they dream about. These images are enhanced with simple, childlike line art – a “thought bubble” around an empty dinner plate, and a frame around their faces that focuses attention on their expressions. Each expression can be interpreted in two ways – as reflecting the seriousness of their aspirations or revealing the underlying hunger that distracts and inhibits them from realizing their dreams.
The campaign’s main message is delivered in three parts. Part one states the problem: “Hungry kids dream of food. Not the future.”
Part two is a tagline that states the solution SOK strives to provide:
“We’re feeding their dreams.” The dream of not being hungry and the dream of what their future may hold.
Part three is the call to action: “We Need Your Help”
A personal appeal to engage prospective donors, volunteers, partners and sponsors in feeding the dreams of thousands of hungry kids. The campaign disrupts the notion of how a charity is presented to its audience and the media. It galvanizes attention on SOK’s mission and clearly differentiates it from similar competing charities.
Website
BRAND created a new, full-featured SOK website with a robust Content Management System and key platform integrations that:
• Ensure a seamless, efficient donation process
• Capture and manage donor information and track donations
• Power email marketing campaigns and automated email responses
• Enable volunteers to apply and sign up to participate in meal bagging events, meal bag deliveries, fundraising events and other critical operations
The site design and content introduced and amplified SOK’s new brand and creative strategies. It recognizes sponsors and partnership, promotes all fundraising events, highlights media coverage, and updates donors and visitors on SOK’s latest developments and accomplishments.
Public Relations
BRAND helped develop and implement effective public relations strategies and assets, including a comprehensive digital press kit, story pitches, press releases and media alerts, as well as comprehensive PR monitoring and media database support.
We also cultivated key media relationships and secured substantial unpaid media coverage that exponentially increased awareness of SOK’s brand, mission, objectives, needs, fundraising events, partnerships and accomplishments throughout Southern Nevada.
$1.3M
In 2024, these efforts delivered
$1.3 million in publicity value.
Advertising
Founded in 2013, SOK now provides more than 4,000 weekend meal bags to food-insecure elementary and middle school students in 95 schools. But after 11 years, the foundation had remained almost unknown in the broader community.
BRAND created a high-impact advertising campaign to explode awareness of the SOK brand and its critical mission throughout the Las Vegas valley, and promote its three major fundraising events that drive annual revenue.
604
604 total media mentions
215.8M
215.8 million total impressions
$1.3M
$1.3 million in equivalent media value
Programmatic
Campaigns
Fundraising & Promotions
BRAND created a fundraising toolkit and various print and digital collateral materials to improve donor/prospect communication and fundraising efficiency, and promote SOK’s three annual fundraising events. This included on-site event signage and swag highlighting event sponsors for SOK’s annual bowling and golf tournaments.
We also created proposal presentations to help secure major new local business sponsorships and corporate partnerships that provide significant, multi-year funding. They also generate fresh storytelling opportunities that drive ongoing PR and content marketing programs.
Together, these efforts have attracted new donors, committed corporate partners and private foundations that have generated significant new revenue to support, improve and expand SOK operations.
See More Client Work
