Marketing Campaigns: CY at cityyear.org
In 2018, we were seeking a major shift for our visual brand to ensure resonance with our ever-evolving prospects (17-25 year-olds). We selected Boston-based Connelly Partners because of a fresh and striking concept called CY.
I played a key role working closely to guide the Connelly team to reach this outcome. The new color palette helped City Year stand out, moving to more mature & saturated colors that are also better for legibility for people of different vision abilities. The collage look gave it a bespoke, hand-crafted feel that let us tell our story of impact with students while also feeling homemade, highlighting our humanity and connection. CY is authentic, inspirational, and approachable.
Under my guidance, Connelly Partners created two concepts for posters and I led my team to build out all the complementing pieces.
New Website
In conjunction with the new campaign, we partnered with Connelly Partners to craft a new website design on Wordpress (moving off of Drupal). Connelly helped us build many of the templates and then handed it to our team to build the entire website, moving from over 10,000 website pages to just under 1,000 and setting up a clear system for UX.
Some stats from the switch:
621,000 page views (4.5% increase yoy)
Generated 2,700 prospects organically (directly from website and blog)
60% of the website audience is recruitment (this is a 30% increase yoy)
27,937 clicks on “Apply Now” button
New Videos
Partnering with City Year, we did a photo and video shoot in Tulsa (I provided all the photography) to capture two concepts that were cut into :30 and :15 second spots. The first, The Sound of Change, is about how City Year is a challenge, but a worthwhile one and it captures the energy and idealism of the young people who commit to a year of service. The second video, Do You See You?, is a direct challenge to potential corps members, highlighting how unique and powerful an experience it can be to do a City Year.
The Sound of Change :30
Do You See You? :30