Challenges

Parks and Recreation Ontario (PRO) is a non-profit association that advances the health, social, and environmental benefits of quality recreation and parks through evidence-based practices, resources, and collaborative partnerships. They envision a future for Ontario where every person has equitable access to vibrant communities, sustainable environments, and personal health.

PRO believes that every child deserves quality experiences that support healthy child development. Created in 2001, HIGH FIVE is Canada’s only comprehensive quality standard for children’s programs. HIGH FIVE’s proprietary approach is built on a quality framework, consisting of program assessments, awareness, policies and procedures, and training and development. Since then, the standard has evolved to include training on several other factors including mental health, competitive sport programs, and healthy aging.

Intent was engaged to develop, and implement a comprehensive marketing strategy, along with the development of an overall campaign. Our goals were to increase unique registrants to 1,500 new registrants by March 2022. With the campaign starting in February 2022, it was important to develop a clear plan to achieve these goals.

Strategy

Our first step was our Listen phase—a research and discovery exercise to understand HIGH FIVE as an organization, its clients and stakeholders, and to get a sense of how we could best engage with them. As part of this phase, we facilitated a 90-minute discovery kickoff session aimed at understanding HIGH FIVE, their audiences and major stakeholders, organizational aspirations for the future, and how they define project success. Intent also reviewed and analyzed HIGH FIVE’s website, current documentation, legacy materials, and comparable organizations to help us identify how to improve and optimize the campaign and rollout.

Solutions

Informed by what we’ve learned in our Listen Phase, we developed a comprehensive marketing strategy that included our analysis of comparable organizations, an overview of HIGH FIVE’s current audiences, marketing campaign recommendations, the campaign plan, and a social media content calendar. 

We wanted to ensure our creative approaches targeted a wide range of audiences, with the intention of increasing national brand awareness. In our Design process, we considered how our creative approaches would reach individuals in different provinces, especially considering the majority of HIGH FIVE’s past registrants mainly coming from Ontario. With all of this in mind, we developed a marketing strategy that leveraged social media advertising, email marketing, digital marketing using Google ads, and the development of a campaign landing page.

Our strategy and creative approach focused on storytelling as the main focal point. In all of our designs, we highlighted our target audience, specifically coaches. Whether they coach, train, organize events, or want to get involved in general, we were inspired by these individuals who are often driven by a desire to help others develop their skills as athletes, or simply to help keep their communities healthy. In our concept, we explored the various reasons people get engaged in the first place with the tagline: I coach because.