Case Studies/Success
Stories
Success
Story: “Image”
– The Reno Rodeo
Non-Profit Positioning, Event Promotion, Media Relationship Development
“The Wildest, Richest Rodeo in the West,” is the 3rd largest and richest rodeo in North America. The Reno Rodeo is a not-for-profit organization and is the longest running community event in Reno, Nevada, 85 years, a Nevada tradition. They are a large tourist draw to the community bringing in over $34.5 million annually to the local economy. The event draws over 1000 professional rodeo contestants. Rodeo week lasts 9 days and with other rodeo related events and competitions during the week in addition to the rodeo the payout reaches $2.5 million.
We have been involved in the relationship for 5 consecutive years. First, we redeveloped their web site to one of great success and by implementing our strategic marketing plan it now receives over 1,000,000 hits during the month of the event. “We created a plan for marketing the web site and have stuck to it. I applaud the organization for their commitment to
RENORODEO.COM, even though 5 of the 10 members of the Executive Committee do not own computers,” said Advertising Committee Chair Greg Williams. The web site offers information about the rodeo and its events, as well as, information for sponsors, the press, fans and also an intranet site for members. The web site was developed as a press/media
friendly web site. The intranet site offers members the ability to look up the volunteer roster, the member newsletter, calendar and committee assignments. The intranet site was developed in response to growing concerns by the Reno Rodeo office staff that received over 50 phone calls per day from members asking for another members phone number. Due to our proactive, results based marketing plan which resulted in a return on investment they asked us to take over the marketing, sponsor relationship development, public relations, graphic design and advertising development.
Our Marketing/PR goals for the promotion of the rodeo are a three-prong attack. One, promotion of a community event and tourist/economic development. Two, awareness of an all-volunteer non-profit organization that gives over $200,000 back to the community annually through scholarships, literacy programs and special children’s programs with volunteers that each donate over 100 hours a year. Three, exposure of one of the largest professional rodeo sporting events in North America, sanctioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association
(PRCA).
We have developed an image of the rodeo for the community. We developed them from a rodeo and western lifestyle only event to a professional event organization with credibility in the community and the professional rodeo circuit, integrity with the image of the Reno Rodeo Foundation and charity programs and a well-recognized positive economic impact on the community of Reno, Nevada population 340,000.
Additional goals we helped the rodeo achieve were to increase ticket sales, identify and increase revenue among all profit centers, market the image, maintain the brand, promote the Reno Rodeo Foundation, manage publicity for other events during rodeo week, manage sponsor relationships, leverage sponsor relationships for marketing purposes and maximize and increase media coverage for the rodeo.
We managed 319 local market Television news stories or features. We created and developed a relationship with the local ABC affiliate KOLO TV News Channel 8 to have their local news at 5, 5:30 and 6:30 PM produced live from a platform in the Rodeo Arena. This gave the Reno Rodeo a total of over 9 hours of live news broadcast coverage during the rodeo week. The Reno Rodeo is also on the Wrangler PRCA Summer Tour and is televised on ESPN, ESPN2 and OLN (A total of 8 hours of national television broadcast). They received over 7200 column inches of editorial news stories in Print either newspaper or magazine, approximately 10,000 free mentions on Radio, more than 300 news stories on radio and over 2000 web sites picked up the Internet publicity campaign for links and stories such as, ABOUT.COM, RENOTAHOEFUN.COM, RGJ.COM, RENO.COM, TAHOE.COM, PRORODEO.COM and many others for a total of $2.5 Million in free exposure.
Click
here for PR Results of 2002 Reno Rodeo
(Adobe .PDF file).
We also recognized that the goals of the Reno Rodeo members to achieve an annual dollar donation amount were overwhelming, so we developed a solution, a new Nevada state license plate,
”The
Rodeo State”
plate. We assisted in the development and promotion of legislation in the
Nevada
State Legislature Bill Text (AB 113)
for the creation of the new plate. Click here for AB113
Amendment 793
and AB113
Amendment 201,
which the Governor, Kenny Guinn signed into law on June 5, 2001.
Nevada has many specially designated charitable license plates. The
money raised through DMV registrations and purchases of the
specialized “Rodeo State” license plate will go to the Reno
Rodeo Foundation and the Nevada High School Rodeo Association.
To market the concept and raise awareness we partnered up with the
Reno Gazette Journal newspaper and their web site RGJ.COM. Through
creative graphic design, we developed 3 templates for the people of
the state of Nevada to vote on to be the next license plate. We
promoted the idea of a new plate in print, radio and television and
encouraged the residents to go online to
www.rgj.com and
vote for the design of the plate. After 2 months of voting and
promotion the people chose a final. We created a
permission-marketing program, which resulted in issue awareness and
database collection to further market services to. The "Rodeo
State" plate is now the 4th fastest selling charitable license
plate in the history of the state of Nevada. Proceeds from DMV
registration fees in 15 months since its public launch have totaled
over $100,000.
