City of Seattle, Office of Emergency Management
The Situation
In May of 2015, the City of Seattle’s Office of Emergency Management asked us to develop a multi-dimensional campaign for Seattle's new emergency notification system, AlertSeattle. Tasked with developing the branding, messaging, collateral, earned media, media strategy and an introduction video for the program, we worked under a tight deadline to launch this vital safety project.
The Approach
Soapbox developed a logo, tagline and established branding guidelines – ensuring that messaging was clear and could be easily translated for non-English speakers, as well as conveyed a sense of urgency and emergency. Team Soapbox also produced an informational video that aired on KING 5 (both a 15- and 30-second video), social media, and the AlertSeattle website.
Once the media buy plan was developed, Soapbox worked rapidly to execute the buy from outdoor placements to negotiating bundles to producing web ads. All ads were monitored to ensure they were running as placed. For social media and AdWords, Soapbox performed A/B testing and monitored results, adjusting audiences, keywords and creative as needed for best results in the limited timeframe.
From there, we set forth with designing several marketing assets for AlertSeattle – everything from large-scale print materials like banners, posters and billboards, to web graphics and social media buttons, to informational flyers that were translated into 14 different languages. Much of this material focused on informational and instructional visuals with simple graphics, to make the campaign easily-digestible.
The Results
Alert Seattle successfully launched on August 4th and by year-end had met and exceeded the original registration goal of 6,000. By the end of 2015, the Office of Emergency Management recorded more than 17,000 individuals had registered for AlertSeattle. The graphics we created are still used by the City of Seattle and our informational flyers are available at public libraries and community events on preparedness.