Boys & Girls Clubs of America

Non-profits

Boys & Girls Clubs of America Generates Smiles and Support with User-Generated Content

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.

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.

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 TrueLoyal, 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 TrueLoyal was especially equipped to take on this challenge.

Rivers first used TrueLoyal, 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 TrueLoyal just keeps growing and growing from there. On the event side, TrueLoyal 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 TrueLoyal . Moving beyond event activation, Rivers discovered that other tools just couldn’t match what TrueLoyal offers.

But TrueLoyal 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 TrueLoyal 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, TrueLoyal amounted to a multitiered solution that covered much more than its initial usage. For BGCA, TrueLoyal’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 TrueLoyal is largely due to the results the platform has generated.

The greatest proof of TrueLoyal’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 TrueLoyal for website purposes.

Outside of marketing, BGCA’s resource development team—which raises funds for the nonprofit—utilizes TrueLoyal 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.

The ease with which Rivers and the digital marketing team can use TrueLoyal means they’re freed to be more strategic.

“TrueLoyal takes me out of the tactical execution. And puts me in a place where I can think more strategically.” said Rivers.

And now that TrueLoyal’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.

Overtime, TrueLoyal 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 TrueLoyal has helped BGCA overcome:

“With TrueLoyal, 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.”

For those looking at TrueLoyal 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:

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, TrueLoyal 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, “TrueLoyal 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.”

Tiffany Rivers

BGCA

TrueLoyal came on-board early as a sponsor for our live event, providing an easy way for us to display sponsor info before and after sessions along with live-streaming feedback about the event on social media. When we went virtual, they pivoted with us, providing a way for us to continue providing that info between sessions. Post-event, they have provided us with valuable information about social media interaction with the event.

Tiffany Rivers

BGCA

For every campaign in 2018, the use of TrueLoyal has come up—for events and digital campaigns. TrueLoyal 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.