Saskatoon Community Foundation received a significant (and we do mean significant) donation from a generous donor. The intention of the gift was to direct funds towards a marketing campaign and brand refresh—and turn this amazing organization into a recognizable community staple.
Client:
Saskatoon Community Foundation
Production company:
Chess Club Agency
Deliverables:
TV
Online
Social media
The overall project—a 2-to-3-year awareness campaign—is ongoing, but it began with a visual refresh. This included a new logo, a new VID, and website updates. From there, we started on the first major campaign.
We took a simple, direct approach, focusing on one of the main benefits of giving through Saskatoon Community Foundation: your story lives on in Saskatoon for years to come.
Leaning into the story aspect, we created beautiful scenes of giving in the form of a large, pop-up storybook. With help from a paper artist, we built out our world—quite literally. Against the Saskatoon skyline, including the historic Bessborough hotel and one of our beloved bridges, we symbolized some of the numerous local initiatives Saskatoon Community Foundation supports, depicting a music room, hospital room, and community garden. Hands dropped in throughout the video to deliver items to each scene— expressing the act of charitable giving— while a voice-over explained what Saskatoon Community Foundation does for our city and their donors.
The video was shot in-house by our main man, Carl Sheldon. We also utilized the ornate, lifelike paper pieces in photoshoots for static outputs—and kept them on permanent display in our office for the creative team to stare at wistfully.
These storybook visuals have since translated to other projects, including DMs and interviews with donors, when we built a “pop-up” tree to scale to immerse our subjects in the storybook world.
Sure, the numbers look good, but we’ll put it simply: the box that said “create greater recognizability locally” was checked.
OK, fine, we’ll look at some numbers.
In a post-campaign survey, there was a considerable increase in the number of people who had heard of Saskatoon Community Foundation, and of those who were familiar, well over half had seen one of the advertisements.
Overall, the campaign either delivered or over-delivered on all outputs as planned. The view rate on YouTube surpassed the average Saskatchewan campaign by about 13%, and the digital portion of the campaign sat 33% above the Canadian average.
The client was also eager to share that existing donors had seen the campaign and thoroughly enjoyed it. They were able to reignite past relationships as well as create connections with new donors.
The client was also eager to share that existing donors had seen the campaign and thoroughly enjoyed it. They were able to reignite past relationships as well as create connections with new donors.
