Patriot Day

Challenge

The City of Box Elder was hosting their Fourth Annual Patriot Day event and after three years of self-promotion, they approached RSA in hopes of increasing awareness about the event and receiving more media coverage to drive a larger turnout for the event. As a non-profit organization they didn’t have a lot of money to spend promoting the event so the RSA team needed to come up with a way to promote this event, while keeping costs to a minimum.

Analysis

After speaking with the client to gain a deeper understanding of the goals of this event and why it is hosted, RSA learned about the deep connection of the City of Box Elder and military members. With Ellsworth Air Force Base within their city limits and home to over 7,000 military members and their families, the city wanted to forge a deeper connection between the members of Box Elder community and those who live on base.

In addition, the City of Box Elder prides themselves on providing free events to their community members. At past Patriot Day events, attendees experienced free bouncy castles, a vendor fair, a parade, strongman competition, and so much more all at no cost to them! In order to achieve this, the City of Box Elder relies heavily on community sponsors.

With this knowledge in mind, we knew we had to make sure their sponsors were being recognized and thanked for their contributions.

Strategy

Understanding the importance of not only reaching the community of Box Elder, but encouraging the surrounding town of Rapid city to attend the event, RSA focused our efforts on saturating the City of Box Elder social media pages with information about the event, as well as encouraging them to visit the website to learn more. Knowing that saving money was a big priority we also focused on reaching out to our various media partners to see if we could get any reduced or free promotion of the event.

Social Media and Web Strategy

RSA created and manages the website for the City of Box Elder, so creating a landing page on their website was easy. With our customizable CMS, PageFramer, we already had a template for designing new tiles on their website. Using this template, we built a page on the website that allowed users to learn more information about the event, as well as register their float in the parade, or sign up to sponsor the event. Our digital marketing team curated a content calendar for the month leading up to the event. The posts ranged from highlighting the schedule of events, to generating buzz about the event, to showcasing and thanking event sponsors.

Graphic Design and Traditional Marketing

In additional to our digital marketing efforts, our team also utilized traditional media to raise awareness about the event. Our team of graphic designers created flyers that were sent in Box Elder water bills, billboard ads, newspaper ads, banners and event itineraries. In addition, our video production team created two radio PSA’s and a TV spot to engage viewers and let them know what they could expect at the event. Due to the generosity of our media partners in Rapid City we were able to obtain the billboard advertising for free on seven billboards across town. In addition, the Rapid City Journal donated three ads at no cost to the client. Our radio and TV PSA’s ran on local stations, and we were able to book one of the event staff on a local morning news show.

Results

• Doubled event responses on Facebook
• Nearly tripled event attendance
• Drove nearly a thousand people to The City of Box Elder website via Facebook

The Fourth Annual Patriot Day was a huge success, and ended up being the largest event the City of Box Elder has ever hosted with over 4,000 attendees. The Facebook event for this year’s festivities had more than double the amount of responses than in 2020. Meaning, with a strategic outreach and marketing plan, we were able to double the amount of people who responded to their Facebook event. In addition, thanks to our social media posts, we were able to drive 839 people from Facebook to the Patriot Day landing page we created on their website, making this page the second most visited page on their website in the year, to date.