YMCA ACE presentations

YMCA Campaign

    

Brief: The ace student workshop is a collaborative project that connects students and mentors, to work on creating a campaign for local charities, or non-for-profits. I was paired with Raffale Sanmartin (another student at NAIT) AND Mazi Javidiani (Art Director at Berlin Communications) to create a campaign for the YMCA Edmonton region.

The campaign’s goal was to get 18-24-year-olds interested in becoming volunteers or members at YMCA’s in the Edmonton region. The campaign needed to include posters, an online campaign, and a strategy to attract the key target audience.

Strategy:

When conceptualizing the strategy for the campaign, we wanted to know what actually brought people into gyms. We conducted one on one interviews, compiled secondary research and visited as many YMCA’s as we could. We found that this audience wanted to see three driving factors in the gyms they went to. They wanted a community of like-minded people, a vigorous workout, and good quality gym equipment that was available at reasonable times.

When I say community, I mean friends or family. People wanted to go to the gym with people they were close with and enjoy the workouts with them, rather than by themselves. This audience also had the mindset of challenging themselves and took ownership of getting fit which allowed for the driving factor of competitiveness.

We also took into account what the audience thought of the YMCA. Overall it wasn’t positive, and it was seen more as a place for older generations to work out, or that it had poor equipment. This wasn’t true, however, as they had equipment that was up to the same par as other facilities.

Campaign:

We decided to hit these points home with strong visuals that would emphasize the vigorous workouts that are offered at the YMCA while writing copy that highlighted how the YMCA reached this audience’s viewpoints on fitness while remaining true to the client’s values.

These images then tied back into drawing the audience to post their own moments of fitness, online, at their YMCA gym.

Brand image:

As you can see in some of the above images, the ads took headshots of men and women in the peak moments of their workout, while highlighting the values of the YMCA organization.

Result:

Overall the campaign was well received and will be noted on the ACE site for the mentorship project. Unfortunately, we were unable to take home the award for the project.