After a chance introduction late last year, we were fortunate to be offered a huge opportunity with a new in-kind partner, JCDecaux. Founded in 1964, JCDecaux invented the concept of street furniture in Lyon, France. It quickly became an advertising...
After a chance introduction late last year, we were fortunate to be offered a huge opportunity with a new in-kind partner, JCDecaux. Founded in 1964, JCDecaux invented the concept of street furniture in Lyon, France. It quickly became an advertising revolution and they have since become the leader in Out-of-Home advertising both globally and locally. From billboards and bus shelters to airports and public transport (and everything in between) JCDecaux connects brands with people across Australia to enrich urban life.
In January this year, JCDecaux began a comprehensive Out-of-Home campaign to support our volunteer mentor recruitment drive. The campaign included pro-bono ad space on bus shelters, tram stops and phone booths in communities where we had secured new schools to run our youth mentoring programs. It also included showcasing our broadcast ads on XtrackTV – prominent digital screens positioned in major metro train stations in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Thanks to JCDecaux’s in-kind contribution, we were able to increase our brand awareness across Australia substantially and eventually onboard more than 2000 volunteers, all of whom are now mentoring young people in our one-to-one, in-school mentoring programs this year.
Big goals need great partnerships
One of our key marketing objectives at Raise is to attract volunteers from the broader community and via corporate partnerships to become mentors with Raise. This year we set our sights on a very big goal – grow from mentoring 930 young people in 2020 to over 2000 in 2021.
This level of uplift presents an enormous marketing challenge; the ability to find new ways to get your message across, to connect with people in the heart of community is a tough gig – enter our new partner JCDecaux!
Making our marketing work harder
As a growing charity, the vast majority of our funding is committed to run our programs in order to help as many young people as we can. This leaves us with a very limited budget for marketing activity. A pro-bono offer that enables us to spread our message far and wide in highly targeted areas is a dream come true for an organisation like ours.
The JCDecaux Out-of-Home activity gave us a significant boost in mentor applications over this important Q1 period. We can directly track 233 applications resulted from the JCDecaux activity – that’s 7% of our overall applications for 2021, in a 3-month outdoor campaign – that’s very impressive!
Connecting commitment to community
With a partner like JCDecaux, our ambition to create thriving communities around Australia through our in-school mentoring programs WILL become reality, upheld by the perfect alignment in our goals and common commitment to serve the community. We look forward to evolving our partnership as we continue to empower young people to shape a purposeful life.