HOW TO: BRAINSTORM

At OMG, our philosophy is that the best ideas are a collective process and not the result of a single visionary.  Every product we produce, strategy we conceive, idea we create, comes from a team of a dozen professionals, working together with the client.

Of course, that’s what all agencies say.  So, how do we do it?  We brainstorm.

Brainstorming is a technique used to generate ideas to develop creative and innovative strategies for our clients to achieve their business goals. Our first brainstorming session generally overviews the issue and focuses on what we can do to help. For us, brainstorming is a collective effort between marketing strategists, writers, designers, administrators and clients. Basically, no brain will be left unpicked.

Using The Children’s Aid Society of Oxford County (CAS-Oxford) as an example, we’ll take you through the process of effectively brainstorming to create an integrated marketing strategy that serves the clients goals.

Step 1: What’s your problem?

Identifying your challenge is the best way for us to focus the brainstorming session – whatever we come up with must address the obstacles you have and will face and develop a new strategy to reach your goals.

For CAS-Oxford, their biggest challenge was the lack of Foster Parents in the county, which they attributed to lack of knowledge and misconceptions around fostering.

The goal then became to begin educating the public on different options and opportunities in fostering, and by accomplishing that, hopefully get more people willing to take the first steps to becoming a Foster Parent.

Step 2: Obstacles and Objectives

Obviously, recruiting foster parents has been an ongoing challenge for CAS-Oxford. Before we jumped in with both feet, we needed to identify the obstacles they faced and what their objectives are in answer to those obstacles. 

Our next step was to put our collective brains together and start finding a way to overcome the obstacles, achieve the objectives and work toward developing a campaign with measured results.

Step 3: Creating solutions

It was clear from the beginning that holding an event was a good place to start. We realized that CAS-Oxford had a lot of information about fostering the public needed to know, but given the sheer volume of it, plus the inability to reach smaller markets via advertising, we knew a media campaign just wouldn’t do. To truly educate the public, we had to get them one-on-one. Gaining direct access to potential foster parents was an opportunity for CAS-Oxford to make the Agency more approachable and less threatening.

The event, which we branded the “Coffee Spot”, would be informal and portable, so that it could be held in various communities throughout Oxford County.  The focus of the event was to give people an opportunity to learn the facts about fostering without making a specific commitment.

But how could we get them to the event? That is where marketing comes in.

We knew the call to action of any promotion we did would be to attend the Coffee Spot, but it also needed to motivate the public to want to learn more about fostering. We threw around different ideas about what motivates someone to become a Foster Parent – should we use the “tug on the heartstrings” approach or an “in-your-face” technique? In the end, we did a bit of both.
We took a chance that the public would care that more than half of children in care were being placed outside of the county. The motivation was then one of both compassion and responsibility. For the “in-your-face” tactic, we used bold colours, direct messages and images that would automatically evoke an emotional reaction.

The media campaign, called “Fostering: Learn the Facts”, deconstructed the myths about fostering with a fact about foster parents and children in Oxford County. Using different myths and facts allowed us to breakthrough stereotypes, use different images to evoke emotions and give us the perfect segue to encourage the public to learn all the facts at the coffee spot.

Conclusion

CAS-Oxford made a very large and very public investment in this campaign and achieved results that surpassed our original goals.

Based on the expected response from our paid advertising, poster distribution and radio spots, we (OMG and the client) determined having three interested parties (individuals or families) at the Coffee Spot would make the event a success. After the first Coffee Spot, CAS-Oxford had 10 interested parties sign up for foster parent training and many more stopped by to ask questions and take the brochure.

We provided CAS-Oxford with an Equivalent Advertising Value, which indicates what unpaid editorial coverage is worth in terms of the equivalent paid advertising space. With the interviews and editorial that resulted from our press release and other promotions, the Foster Parent campaign received approximately the equivalent of $14,000 in unpaid advertising.

The campaign’s bold new design got a lot of attention from the community and neighbouring agencies, culminating in winning a Summit International Award for Marketing Effectiveness in the public service category.

It all started with a bunch of people sitting around the boardroom table. The beauty of brainstorming is to just let it happen – whether it takes half and hour or two hours, whether you get 10 great ideas or just one. For OMG, the most important thing is to talk to our clients – even if we’re the marketing experts, they’re the experts of what they do.  At the very least, it’s the best place to start.