City of Sapulpa
The Task at Hand
When the City Manager for Sapulpa, Oklahoma approached Chatter Marketing for marketing assistance with educating its citizens about their upcoming bond election, Chatter Marketing jumped at the chance to assist.
The City of Sapulpa had six (6) propositions on the ballot and it needed to educate the entire city about the need to pass each one. Unfortunately, there existed—within the community—some negative views from previous city leadership. The new marketing campaign had to take the negativity head-on and turn it into a positive for where the city needed to go if it was going to be able to move forward with progress.
After several discussions with city officials and a great deal of strategic planning, Chatter Marketing developed a plan of action that utilized targeted-social-media campaign videos.
Campaign Logo and Tagline
The first step for Chatter Marketing was to develop an overall look and feel of the campaign. We wanted to give the upcoming election a brand identity. We designed a campaign logo and tagline that alerted voters, with a glimpse, to what this bond election stood for: that passing all six propositions was the “Road to a Better Sapulpa.”
New City Logo
The Chatter Marketing creative team also designed a city logo, complementary to the bond election logo, that Sapulpa could employ after the bond election campaign. This new brand identity encompassed the city’s unique history while also giving a nod to where it was headed—along the Route 66 corridor.
Once the overall look, feel and message of the Bond Election marketing campaign was revealed, we had to deliver the plan for getting the word out about each proposition. The challenge was that we had to deliver the messages to Sapulpa residents ONLY—and on a limited budget. To accomplish this, we chose to push each proposal using video marketing on social media.
Anticipating that each proposition would be met with scrutiny, we knew we needed a leader in the community, someone that the residents trusted, to deliver the outline of each proposition. We chose a well-respected captain of the Sapulpa Police Department to help us explain each proposition in detail.
Chatter Marketing spent weeks in the city with a camera crew. Our team interviewed residents and business owners. We shot hours of B-roll of real people, in real scenarios, all over the city. We wanted to llustrate everyday life in the City of Sapulpa, and that real businesses and people would be affected by the voting decisions. And, we used the Captain as our spokesperson to narrate each video.
The Launch
Once the videos were produced, it was time to launch the social media campaigns. We took each video and ran separate campaigns, targeting the entire city through social targeting. We also developed a landing page within the City of Sapulpa’s website where people could get additional information as needed.
Upon launch—and throughout the entire campaign—our team anticipated negative responses from the citizens of Sapulpa. And we were right, but we weren’t discouraged. Our team of social media professionals handled each and every comment and worked with city leaders to combat the negative criticism. There were even moments when the city leaders wanted to pull away from the campaign because of the negativity associated with each proposition. They feared that negative comments would affect the overall outcome of the election. Our team of professionals expected the onset of negativity and did our best to educate and explain each proposition—and it worked!
Through months of education, launching videos, targeting individuals on social media, answering questions, pushing to the landing page, and staying the course, voting day finally arrived.
On January 14, 2020, the residents of Sapulpa went to the polls to cast their votes. The results: ALL 6 propositions PASSED and now the City of Sapulpa will be able to upgrade and build new infrastructure for its residents!
This chart reveals the number of people reached during our 6-week social media campaign. The results are impressive.
