SIMPLE STEPS SAVE LIVES CAMPAIGN

What if you could take a few simple steps to protect your children from hidden dangers in and around your home, would you do it? It is a rhetorical question, because what parent would not do whatever they had to do to protect the lives and safety of their most treasured possessions?

Yet, the fact is, many parents do not do basic things to ensure their children are not endangered in their own home, including drowning in pools or being badly injured by furniture toppling over on their youngsters.

Goodwill Communications was tasked to launch a national PSA campaign on behalf of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) titled: “Pool Safely.”

The CPSC had conducted extensive research which showed that children younger than age 5 represent more than 75 percent of all pool and spa submersion deaths and 78 percent of pool and spa submersion injuries in the United States involving children younger than 15 years of age. Further, their research showed that African-American and Hispanic children between the ages of 5 and 14 are at a higher risk of drowning.

Distribution Plan

Some of the earlier Pool Safely campaigns were disseminated to the media prior to migrating to a digital distribution procedure, so we designed colorful graphics packages for both TV and radio and in both English and Spanish. The earlier campaign TV PSAs were distributed to 1,000 TV stations and 53 national networks. TV PSAs as well as to 500 cable stations as part of our CablePAK compilation distribution service.

Due to the fact that there are some stations on the southern and western states on the Mexican border which use both English and Spanish stations, we packaged the English and Spanish PSAs together, which also reduced costs.

Promotion

As we do with all of our client campaigns we aggressively promoted the Pool Safety campaign to the national and local media:

  • We created a custom newsletter on the campaign which was inserted in packages sent to both broadcast and cable stations
  • We created colorful blast emails and hard copy direct mail pieces that let the media know where they could download the Pool Safely PSAs.
  • We distributed a news release via PR Web to major search engines like Google, Yahoo! News, and Bing, and to more than 250,000 subscribers through RSS, PRWeb’s Mobile Network, eMediaWire, Yahoo! News, Topix and Google News.
  • We posted broadcast quality versions of the pool safety PSAs to our PSA Digital download site and posted them on the National Association of Broadcasters’ Spot Center.

Network Outreach

Our TV outreach specialist personally contacted 153 national cable networks to pitch the PSAs resulting in 2,000 airplays on 29 networks and a value of $1,040,155.

They included: MSNBC, Tennis Channel, The Africa Channel, Comcast Sports, Fox Business, Fox Sport, NBC Sports, NHL Network, Oygen, SciFy, Cooking Channel, DIY, Food Network, Home & Garden and the Travel Channel. PSAs also appeared 4,200 times on Walmart’s Checkout Channel in 525 of their big box retail outlets, generating $150,000 in value.

Targeting Warm Weather States

Due to the longer swimming season in warm weather states, we placed 108 outdoor posters in Arizona, Texas, California, South Florida and throughout the Washington Metro Area Transit system. This included interior and exterior bus posters, interior posters in subway cars and on subway platforms. The value of this exposure was $102,600.

This graph shows the values by media type which reinforces the importance of using a broad media mix when trying to reach a diverse audience.