Bowl ’24

So Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Sudbury is going back to their Bowl For Kids Sake fundraiser for the first time since the 2020 event was cancelled to Covid. They ask me for a teaser. It’s coming up. May 24.

What’s your theme, I ask. They don’t know yet. Just make a generic one for now.

I’ll do you one better.

Will anyone get it?

We’ll see.

In my ideal world, someone will question… “Why did you post a picture of a bowl?”.

“Wait. A bowl? As in… ARE YOU BRINGING BACK BOWL FOR KIDS SAKE!?!?!?!”

It may or may not play out that way. One can hope. I’ll keep this blog updated as it develops.

March 13, 2024

Had to give it a bit of a nudge, but people started to catch on. Maybe more patience was needed, as the agency went and posted the next image when it seemed like nobody was getting the “bowl” teaser. But that’s okay. People are starting to talk.

The little anthropomorphic bowling ball is so well known among the die-hards that they don’t even need to see “Bowl For Kids Sake” to know what it is. I suppose the fact that, at its core, it’s a bowling ball… also gives the game away.

So, the theme, I’m told will be “carnival”. Carnival. Circus. Oh, yeah. I can work with that. The question is, will the agency let me take our little clown a little deeper into Heath Ledger “Joker” territory than your typical more wholesome clown? (are any clowns really wholesome… really?)

March 14, 2024

I’d thought to go full Joker with scrawled on green hair or even a big puff of hair and maybe more makeup. But, once I got the flower and trampy bowler hat on there, it really seemed enough.

This poster is still in “teaser” territory. Will I leave it simple, on white? Or will I use the pin as the basis for a big top tent and turn this into a garish monstrosity? I’m not sure. That’s a worry for another night.

March 22, 2024

“Could I get the full bowling package soon? Please? Pretty please? Pretty pretty pretty please?”

Okay, I may have embelleshed that a little, but that’s in essence the message I got. Which meant it was time to accelerate the process and get the full poster created. I’d envisioned doing something with a bowling pin holding up the inside of a circus tent, and I downloaded a circus tent interior stock photo to that end, but as I started playing with it, I knew I’d have to make the clown-ball-head much too small.

Generally, I like to have a bowling pin in the poster. It’s not a “rule”, nobody’s enforcing it. It’s just something that I like to make sure I have. So, where’d it fit? In the “O” of “Bowling”. Get some textures in the “Bowl For Kids Sake”. The same grunge texture went in “Bowl” and “For Kids Sake”, so the words “Bowl For Kids Sake” would flow. But at the same time, the yellow/orange in both “Big Top” and “Bowl” ensured that “Big Top Bowl” could flow properly too. I’d been sloppy adding shading to the flower in the first pass, so that got some more care. And as I stared at it, I wondered if I wanted a slap-on poster sticker to get the details on… but then I thought “what if I played with the idea of a poster being ripped off the wall instead?”

So, there you go. This year’s Bowl For Kids Sake poster. There’ll be more collaterals to go with it, but this is the dominant image of this year’s campaign… and it feels like a worthy addition to the lineage.

April 30, 2024

Added some more characters and corresponding posters to the mix… with taglines/headlines/CTAs/bad puns and dad jokes appropriate to the characters.

One thing they needed were “Sponsor Ads”, thanking each level of sponsor for their support. I assigned each sponsor level an appropriate character. In fact, some lined up accidentally – the Carnival Barker was unintentionally perfect for the “Presenting Sponsor”, while the flaming juggler was created specifically for the “Strike Sponsor” classification, which turned out to have no sponsors, so it’s not here.

The bowler package always has a bunch of pieces that aren’t really worth showing here. I did have some fun with the prize list, using it initially on the Pledge Sheet and then drawing it out as its own entity.

You’ll notice the little Captain America-esque character for “Children’s Superhero Sponsor”… this was recycled from an earlier campaign as it fit the title. I’d later replace him in the actual promotional materials with the strongman. Unfortunately, sometimes these things are done seat-of-the-pants and released live into the world as they’re done… and they end up existing out in the wild as they were, even though later ideas would supercede them. Would be nice to be able to put all this stuff together completely before releasing everything… it’s just not the way it works sometimes.

May 12 – Problem Solving Time

Sometimes this job comes with different requirements. Sometimes they just have a small set of easily definable needs. I do them, hand stuff over and they run with them. Sometimes, though… I have to get more involved and lend not just my design skills but my problem solving and marketing skills as well.

In this case, response has been sluggish to the fundraiser. There may be any number of reasons for it. The crowd may be “stale” and just tapped out. Covid did a real number on in-person engagement. Where there was once a vibrant community of people once eager to spend time with each other, that spirit seems to have waned. There may very well be deeper issues plaguing participation, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

I don’t have a magic bullet for this one. I’m not a marketing guru… all I have is stuff I’ve picked up over the years, stuff I’ve read and some of my own intuition. And, I don’t have a lot of time.

THE VIDEO

So… this took some work. Ideally this would have been first out of the gate to grab everyone’s attention. But, given the “seat of the pants” way BBBS and I end up working, it’s not like I have the time to plan out campaigns in their entirety before we launch. I’m not an agency… I’m just a guy doing this in my off hours, so I tend to be more reactive to requests and needs as they pop up.

Faced with that reality, I took a look at what I thought might help:

1. Motion. Videos and animations are known to attract more attention than stills.
   • They’re also a LOT more work.
   • They also need a big stable of assets created
   • I also took advantage of sound here. It’s not essential. If someone has the audio muted, they don’t miss out on the message. But if they do hear it, it certainly adds to it. And to those old enough to have been watching The Simpons from the beginning, they’ll certainly picture “the bear driving around in the little car” when they hear “Entry Of The Gladiators”.
2. Sharing – the best way to get the message out there is to lean into peoples’ self-interest. Sad but true.

Soooooo… I made a video.

Like I said, ideally this would have launched the campaign, but the way it all came together, I wouldn’t have had all these assets had I not gone forward with a bunch of of individual posts with the different characters.

Anyways, I worked out with Chantal that they’d put up some prizes on offer. Share this video on Facebook, and anyone that shares it from their share gets their name in a draw for one of those prizes. Self-interest can always work wonders, so giving people a reason to share – trying to win a free pizza or one of the other prizes, even if they don’t feel like attending… that can make all the difference.

I have an alternative version that doesn’t invite people to share, but instead just sends them to the Facebook account. That one I can post on my Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn and Threads as “Hey check out what I did in a professional capacity”, and Chantal can post it on hers as well. But the “share to get your name in a draw” doesn’t enter into this, and would get confusing and impossible to track if people shared them on those other platforms. So…

THE OTHER VIDEO

That wasn’t actually the first video I created. This one was. They typically reserve the final bowling slot of the evening as a “Teen Glow Bowl”. So, wanting to create something really eye-catching in that capacity, that’s when I first decided to break from the still image post and go with something a little flashier.

So, the video process actually started out pretty simply. Just a shifting background with hyper-saturated colours to catch some eyes. I was going to shift the background colour of the main BFKS video as well, but once I got the text moving, and the little balls doing their animations, I realized that may be just too much movement at once.

TARGET AUDIENCES

One request I got was to target The Bigs. They constantly complain that they have no opportunities to meet with other Bigs, and here they’ve got this Bowl For Kids Sake but they weren’t taking advantage of that. So, Chantal wanted to say “Hey, we’ve listened, come bowl with other Bigs at this time slot”. It was fun to make “Little” versions of those three characters. I expect we’ll create some more time slot oriented promo posts over the next week to try and target specific audiences to them.

We actually only ended up creating two… one for the Bigs, and one for families. It was, though, a lot of fun creating the “visual metaphors” for both, wherein I took existing resources and worked them to tell stories. In the Bigs ad, I took three of the characters already created and made “Junior” versions of each. For the Families ad, I took two of the characters with their junior versions and made one more that was an amalgam of both, flipping the smile upside down for that “one other temperament” that always emerges.

May 28, 2024

The event’s come and gone, but I actually haven’t finished all the updates. Things got busy leading up to it.

So, this came about after a conversation with a trusted colleague who suggested that for all the fun of the anthropomorphic bowling balls and pushing of the prize list, something might be getting lost in the shuffle… the reason why people would want to support the fundraiser in the first place. That warm and fuzzy feeling you get for helping out “the kids”. So, I gave it some thought, and went back to something I’d done for the BBBS Matched magazine last year… a little page-filling ad (that later got posted online) that literally said “This is why we do this”… so, I brought those kids in, used the “Kids” font on the “Kids” word and just posted a reminder…

June 8, 2024 – Postmortem

At this point I’m looking back at an event that’s come and gone. I made the trip to Sudbury to be part of it. It was bittersweet, to be honest. By no means a resounding success in terms of individual fundraisers showing up to bowl… back in the heyday, it was a vibrant community event that had people dressing up, excited to be there… that whole buzz just wasn’t there this year.

On the other hand, it was actually been a tremendous success in terms of corporate sponsors donating, as you can see from the big printed Thank You Sponsors poster below.

But… the community buzz. That’s a struggle. I opened this big blog entry with the picture of a bowl… just the bowl… and my hope that it might spark an engagement of “bowl…? Bowl For Kids Sake???”… but it didn’t materialize. The lack of Facebook engagement pointed towards a general fatigue in the community spirit itself. But, there are a lot of factors at play:

• Fundraising efforts for BBBS have been on the decline for years now – it’s possible that the community is simply tapped out
• Bowl For Kids Sake was late this year – normally held in late March when there isn’t much to do in the dog days of winter, by holding this one in late May, it was running up against cottage/camp season, which was cited by many as a reason they couldn’t attend
• The agency may have cannibalized the fundraising by also holding a Survivor fundraiser concurrently
• Covid absolutely killed the in-person community spirit, where people just don’t feel the motivation to go out and do things in public like they used to – movie theaters are seeing this massive decline in box office returns as well
• Inflation is hitting people in the wallets – I did a fundraiser earlier this year for Heart & Stroke and it was met with crickets
• The agency has seen a lot of attrition in the community since I originally got involved over 20 years ago – a lot of the passionate individuals that really charged up the community spirit were in their forties and fifties at the time and have since passed away. They have not actually been replaced by new and vibrant individuals, leaving only a dwindling old guard
• The agency has not been expanding its social media reach. I once remarked that “Facebook is where you tend to your existing community. Twitter is where you expand that community”. This was obviously before Twitter became whatever it is today, and the agency doesn’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole anymore. There are other social channels out there, like Instagram and Threads, that could possibly fill that void, but they don’t have the internal resources to commit and I can’t do that whole job all by myself.
• Even the board of directors declined to put together teams, or put any effort into promoting the event amongst their own peers. When the indifference takes root at home, it’s a deeper problem.
• Apparently, and I only found this out the day of the event, but apparently the ideal fundraising teams are put together by corporate sponsors putting teams in, and challenging other corporations to put in their own teams. Wal-Mart used to have a lock on a particular timeslot year after year, but that didn’t happen this year; not with them, nor with anyone else.
• The “whys” of this may vary… the last minute nature of this fundraiser, the timing, the break in the yearly routine… and quite possibly, as it was pointed out by a mentor, the fact that the workforce is changing, with work-from-homes becoming the norm, that means that “team spirit” is getting harder and harder to generate and maintain. Indeed, my day job – when I joined, it was a vibrant office of 45+ staff filling up the entire floor of a building. As of this writing, that floor is being sold off because all the work positions are being filled remotely now and I’ve got to go in and clean out my section because I haven’t done a day of work in the office since December, myself. So, the world’s changing.

It’s a chinscratcher, to be sure. I may not be able to solve this one. In the end, despite having picked up all sorts of insights like a marketing magpie, I am a graphic designer by trade and education, and there are limits to how much I have to offer in that sense. I’ll continue to work with the agency. Chantal is confident that next year’s will be better… but I see a ton of unanswered questions leading up to this result.

But, maybe that’s the starting point. Having questions at all gives you something to work towards answering. Having better questions is even… better.

So, I’ll call it a day on this fundraiser. It’s come and gone. Hopefully I can put some of the lessons learned here to use on the next one.