Washington Interscholastic Activities Association

The Situation:

The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA) is a private, non-profit service organization made up of 800 member high schools and middle-level schools from every corner of the state. The WIAA provides the structure, accountability and consistency through rules and regulations for more than 180,000 high school and middle-level students to participate in five different activity and sixteen athletics programs. The WIAA organizes and oversees more than 120 State Championships for those programs and communicates with schools, students and parents statewide.

The Approach:

Team Soapbox was hired to help the WIAA develop strategy and messaging that emphasized the organization’s role as an administrative body that services its members, stresses their role in overseeing rule-making decisions and polices, rather than setting them, and highlights the value of the organization and of sports and activity participation and culture.

Team Soapbox worked with statewide media outlets to pitch and place more than 35 earned media stories that shined a spotlight on the positive news and stories about the WIAA’s activities. Team Soapbox helped navigate sensitive, contentious, and emerging issues with crisis communications counsel for the organization including several issues with national attention and communications about an ongoing investigative process around a member school.

International Community Health Services (ICHS)

The Situation

Team Soapbox has partnered for on-call communications planning, media relations, transcreation, design and events for 5 years with ICHS, Washington’s largest health care provider targeting Asian Pacific Islanders. ICHS provides culturally and linguistically appropriate health care to low-income, uninsured, underinsured and limited English proficient patients (55% of their patients have limited English speaking skills and need interpretation help).

The Approach

For ICHS marketing efforts, Team Soapbox identified and targeted public audiences based on geography, ethnicity, language, and economic status, and developed holistic advertising strategies to reach them with culturally-appropriate messaging including direct mail, community outreach, niche media buys, in-store advertising and digital advertising.

Team Soapbox also developed culturally-appropriate messaging, photographed ICHS health clients, designed print collateral and translated materials into six languages: Spanish, Somali, Amharic, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese. For opening clinics, we crafted messaging and a campaign plan and created a direct mail piece, translated it, and mailed it to our targeted zip codes with a high level of Russian and Korean populations to inform them they could receive health care in their primary language.  

We’ve developed messaging and materials to reach patients about the importance of dental care; connect with parents about pediatric care in their own language, and reaching foreign-born patients with no primary care provider. Soapbox has also worked with ICHS’s broad group of key stakeholders on strategic messaging and provided communications and messaging training for their culturally and linguistically diverse board of directors.