CASE STUDY
Boys & Girls Clubs of America Generates Smiles and Support with User-Generated Content
Industry
About BGCA
Every day the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) works with its partners, thought leaders, and youth professionals to ensure that every child and teen they serve reaches their full potential.
With 4,300 locations across the United States, the nonprofit is uniquely positioned to achieve this objective with straight As. But in order to generate the reach needed to be effective, BGCA must leverage a cutting-edge digital marketing team. This team is tasked with figuring out how to wrangle and share all the amazing stories that are authentically generated through the important work the organization does daily.
An important pillar in this strategy is digital marketing, placing BGCA’s social media manager, Tiffany Rivers, in a key role to ensure the marketing team effectively develops web and social content to share these stories.
The Challenge: Inspire Audience Action through Authentic Content
Rivers’ day-to-day role involves managing the overall strategy and publishing for BGCA’s social channels. These responsibilities extend to leading content development, engagement with the community, and providing reporting for goals and key programs. She also provides digital support for various campaigns such as Boys & Girls Clubs Week, corporate partnership efforts and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) organizations.
Saying there’s a lot on her plate is an understatement, especially when you consider how Rivers’ day-to-day rolls into the overall digital marketing strategy.
For Rivers and the team, the primary challenge from a content and social media perspective is figuring out how to organically showcase the inspiring work happening on the ground.
“We really want to highlight the work being done at the local level—in the community that we serve. We don’t want it to be the corporate lens of what we do. We want people to see the real work that is being done,”
Tiffany Rivers, BGCA
To eschew the corporate lens, BGCA’s marketing team engages with the community in a manner that garners and nurtures authentic content capture. Showing the actual smiling faces of the kids and teens they’re serving is critical to inspiring participation and support. As an organization that prides itself on generating real social impact, this means that using stock photography across social channels is out of the question.
“We want our audiences to see real kids, teens, and youth development professionals. And to be able to identify and see themselves or fellow club members across the U.S.—inspiring them to do even more at their own clubs,” said Rivers.
The challenge is finding a way to easily capture, curate, and display the vast streams of information created online and on social. BGCA found their answer in TINT, which had already proven itself as a robust event activation tool—helping raise dollars for the Boys & Girls Clubs through real-time engagement on social platforms.
BGCA was stilled faced with the common marketing question of the digital age: how do you ensure that audiences hear about your organization’s unique value in today’s noisy marketplace? Rivers and team realized that TINT was especially equipped to take on this challenge.
The Solution: Weave User-Generated Content into Marketing Strategy
Rivers first used TINT, the leading user-content marketing platform, at BGCA’s annual Keystone Conference where 2,000 teens gathered for the week.
“Our teens love posting. They love seeing themselves. And TINT just keeps growing and growing from there. On the event side, TINT was just so easy for any AV team to plug into and for all of our partners to embrace,” she added.
Going forward, BGCA’s content and social strategy evolved, a transformation powered by TINT. Moving beyond event activation, Rivers discovered that other tools just couldn’t match what TINT offers:
“There are a lot of tools out there, but they have limitations on number of mentions you can pull, what will actually show up in your feed, so it was really tough to get all the data in one place. What we found with TINT was that it’s a one stop shop. I could see all the content and metrics and import or embed those pictures within our site. TINT gave us a solution that didn’t require us to jump from platform to platform.”
Tiffany Rivers, BGCA
But TINT didn’t just offer a simple and comprehensive UGC solution, the platform also proved an effective tool for campaign and content collaboration with partners.
According to Rivers, “Our partnership with Katy Perry recently had her fans engaged with our clubs to earn the opportunity to go to one of her concerts. We found that TINT was the quickest way for us to gather all that content, share on our site, and then actually measure the impact and reach of this particular partnership.”
Ultimately, for BGCA, TINT amounted to a multitiered solution that covered much more than its initial usage. For BGCA, TINT’s use helped overcome a myriad of digital marketing challenges including:
- Event activation and promotion
- User-generated and authentic content development
- Audience inspiration
- Fundraising
- Website and marketing campaign content
- Strategic partnerships and campaign rollouts
As BGCA’s digital marketing strategy grows, so does the appetite for user-generated content across the organization. This desire to use TINT is largely due to the results the platform has generated.
The Results: TINT Engages Partners, Helps Fundraise, Frees Up Time, and Supports Marketing Campaigns
The greatest proof of TINT’s value stems from how well integrated the platform is among the marketing team and organization. Two to three of BGCA’s digital marketing team members engage regularly with TINT for website purposes.
Outside of marketing, BGCA’s resource development team—which raises funds for the nonprofit—utilizes TINT for local events. Events team members are also well versed in the tool, as are groups who serve more specialized areas such as the Native American population.
“TINT is one of the most user-friendly tools we engage with at Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Someone can easily learn it in 30 minutes, which is really brief compared to some of the tools we use for social. We can literally jump on the phone with account reps and give them user access, they download the mobile app on their phone, and they can moderate a TINT feed at an event that day.”
Tiffany Rivers, BGCA
TINT Means More Time
The ease with which Rivers and the digital marketing team can use TINT means they’re freed to be more strategic.
“TINT takes me out of the tactical execution. And puts me in a place where I can think more strategically.” said Rivers.
And now that TINT’s use is widely known within the organization at large, Rivers has found that calls are coming directly to her and her manager, the National Director of Digital Strategy.
“For every campaign in 2018, the use of TINT has come up—for events and digital campaigns. TINT is pretty much a given. It’s just something that looks really clean, is interactive, and gets people excited to kind of see their content shared with a wider audience,”
Tiffany Rivers, BGCA
A Content Platform for Star-Studded Partnerships
Overtime, TINT became the perfect platform for BGCA to collaborate with its many partners. The benefits here extend beyond the time savings produced from not having to “jump from platform to platform” for content to the overall strategy between partners.
Two high-profile events highlight it’s success. First, the #WitnessTheFuture campaign with Katy Perry, followed by an amazing opportunity for kids in Harlem to see the Marvel Studios film, “Black Panther,” in partnership with IMAX. In both cases, the results were unprecedented.
Notably, the reach was garnered without paid media—completely organically. This last point is especially important for Rivers who points to the tight budget of nonprofits as an obstacle that TINT has helped BGCA overcome:
“With TINT, we have these ambassadors for our brand, and depending on their followers, we’re able to multiply that reach and share-of-voice for our organization without the spend. It really scales our reach in a way that is still authentic and tells our story, but also leverages the voices of others.”
TINT Means More Time
For those looking at TINT as a solution, the value is best explained by a power user such as Rivers. To her, four primary benefits are clear.
- Simplicity and standout customer support
- Increased visibility of BGCA’s impact
- Further positions BGCA’s marketing team as the center of excellence for digital strategy
- Empowers the organization to share its stories
Of these benefits, Rivers chose simplicity as the clear frontrunner:
“Ease of use. Ease of use. Ease of use. I just can’t tell you how many platforms are overly complicated. For an enterprise platform, this has been the highest ease of use I’ve experienced.”
Tiffany Rivers, BGCA
Compounding the easy-to-use interface, she points to the unprecedented customer support and the fact that help is just a phone call away.
As a huge bonus, TINT consistently gives the organization’s marketing leadership team enhanced visibility into the great work that’s being done on the local level. For Rivers, the importance of the service is clear, “TINT makes our marketing team a center of excellence for digital strategy, and its use makes it easy for others in our organization to be just as empowered and informed as we are on a consistent basis.”
