When I returned to Kiwanis International in 2013 as Chief Comms Officer, a small volunteer committee was working with the Membership Department on a new member drive/club building initiative. Right out the shoot, I was told there was a problem: The committee wasn’t happy with the creative direction of the initiative’s look/feel and the sub-brand behind it. It wasn’t for lack of an wonderfully talented comms team and great work. Things just weren’t jiving between what the committee wanted to see and the creative drafts they were getting. And, like many initiatives where well-meaning folks dream up taglines and a campaign name ahead of strategy (I don’t blame them, that’s the fun part) the initiative had come to the team already named and with only a vague idea of what that name actually meant or what initiative itself was all about. My job was to “fix it.”
I worked very closely with the Director of Membership to navigate pitfalls, personalities, anything sacred and get to the bottom of what needed to be accomplished. I also talked to my team about the work they had already done. All really good stuff. The Director and I agreed we needed to fix the name, figure out how it applied to an actual club building/membership drive strategy, determine how to sell it to the committee and then work on the creative pieces.
The original name chosen for the initiative was “The Formula for the Future.” Not only a mouthful, but frankly, it sounded a little, well, 1995. Building new clubs and bringing new members into Kiwanis was—and is—vital to membership organizations. They needed something catchy; interesting. Something clubs and members could remember and would want to get involved in around the world.
Oh, and it needed to be translatable in something like eight languages and relevant to multiple cultures. I had learned pretty quickly that the name was one of the committee’s sacred elements; but, maybe I could convince them to whittle it down to just “The Formula.”
And just what was that formula? I thought a lot about that. And that’s where the right tagline played an important role:
Love it. Share it. Live it.
Because it wasn’t just a tagline, it was also three distinct components of the club building/membership drive strategy itself, and the Membership Department would be able to (and did) develop educational materials, toolkits and more to support each component:
Love It focused on the quality and “health” of the member’s existing club. The idea and explanation behind it: When a member truly loves their experience of being a Kiwanis member, they want to share it with other people and are more likely to invite others, recruit new members or participate in new-club building efforts. A strong, healthy club has enthusiastic members who are excited to bring their friends and participate. The Membership Department provided tools to help clubs assess themselves and identify where they might need help getting “healthy” as well as tools to make needed repairs.
Share It built on “love it” and focused on encouraging members to actively invite people to club meetings and service projects, engaging clubs in membership drive activities and promoting new club building in communities. This was more along the lines of the traditional member recruitment materials and strategies of rewards and encouraging members to invite others into Kiwanis. The Membership Department developed tools to facilitate those actions.
Live It built from “love it,” “share it,” and the idea that members themselves are the best advertisements for Kiwanis. This component asked members to be active participants in service projects and for clubs to engage in meaningful service projects. It also emphasized pride of membership and encouraged members to “live Kiwanis out loud” by wearing and using Kiwanis logo things—driving members to Kiwanis’ branded merchandise store.
Now, I don’t want to claim that I did any of this alone; but a great deal of this was my concept and my wordsmithing. I am claiming the credit.
And I used my relationship- and consensus-building super powers to get the “yes” we needed to move forward and for creative budget.
The communications team made some nifty pieces to represent each component, and they developed displays for the Membership Department to take to district conferences where The Formula would be rolled out. I created a presentation to explain the concept, and the creative team made easy-to-understand collateral material to support The Formula, as well as a micro-website accessible only to members so it would not disrupt the Kiwanis brand itself.
As part of The Formula’s launch to clubs around the world, we wanted to set the stage with a video. This was also my concept, and it was anything but easy to pull off. To illustrate how The Formula worked, the storyline I had in mind required a rundown inner-city park and a whole lot of volunteers who wouldn’t mind sweating and working hard. We would need to actually clean up a city park. I called Indy Parks to see what might be reasonable to tackle in a day and got them to agree not to mow for a week. In exchange, we would mow the grounds, and we would paint all the equipment and make small repairs. I called in every favor I had to every friend who could help. And I ordered a truckload of mulch. On the day of the shoot, we really did clean that park up. The best part was near the end of the day when some neighborhood kids showed up and pitched in.
For the film itself, I had smartly called the talented Karen Chakiry to project manage, work with me on the script to tell the story, and find the right videographer. (I later hired Karen full time.) This is the result.
Again, the people in that video are 100% volunteers.
Karen also commissioned Indy’s own Jennie DeVoe to write and record this song for us, which we used behind other videos later:
Kiwanis has moved on to other membership-drive initiatives, but they used The Formula for years. What I loved about this campaign is that it had lots of thoughtful pieces the Membership Department was able to use and build upon. Members did get excited about it—so much so that we had to remind them it was an internal brand and to wear their Kiwanis “K”s rather than The Formula graphics.
Read my personal blog, Wanderlust here: WanderfulThoughts.com
