the brief
The COVID-19 health crisis of the last 18 months has challenged our community in new and unforeseen ways. Our city is vibrant, friendly, forward thinking, innovative, feisty, and wonderfully diverse. And in the pandemic, our city--like many others--was often closed.
The City of Longmont's fledgling communications team was thrust together in a virtual environment, pivoting often with messages of financial support, grief, community outreach, mask initiatives, public health updates, and a perpetual cycle of closure announcements.
As the lifting of health restrictions appeared on the horizon, our team of eleven city employees collaborated to create the Welcome Back to... campaign, an uplifting, multi-channel message of joy and inclusion on a shoestring budget. Our goal is to welcome back residents, volunteers, guests, and partners to all the activities they loved, while also demonstrating the depth and breadth of all that Longmont has to offer.
This campaign runs June through August 2021.
Impact
This campaign is an unprecedented show of solidarity and collaboration between city divisions, a cross-promotional opportunity with our partners, and a message to our residents that the City of Longmont is resilient, invested, and connected. Social media engagement, sentiment, and reach metrics are shaping up excellently.
Social media
Real places, real faces: using our Welcome Back To... templates in Illustrator and InDesign, the team was able to customize #featurefriday and #strongmont posts to suit their department or division. Starting with images taken throughout our community, we used Photoshop and Adobe Stock to selectively swap backgrounds, color correct, and add face coverings to our featured residents.
We designed the campaign to be deliberately simple. It is adaptable to any brand, orientation, or subject matter while maintaining the visual consistency necessary to build trust in our residents.
VIDEO
To reach offline audiences, we created a series of commercials to air on our local Channel 8 public access station. These same spots post every #welcomebackwednesday to all of the City's primary social media channels. The first five commercials have been released. Subsequent spots will air throughout the summer.
In keeping with the accessible and bilingual nature of the print and digital campaign, videos have minimal dialogue and sidecar caption files. These commercials were filmed in-house on a DSLR, iPhone, and Tascam and edited in Premiere Pro using an Adobe Stock audio track thematically throughout. The animated outro was created in-house using After Effects.
PRINT ADS
We also broadened our offline reach with ads in owned and paid media publications.
Partners
To increase buy-in and participation in the larger community, we sent business owners on Main Street a six-page PDF catalog of Welcome Back To... poster and vinyl banner options to display on their storefronts.
signage & wayfinding
Announcing building reopenings is a secondary goal of the campaign. We created large format vinyl banners to hang at each facility and added Welcome Back To... signage along our historic Main Street in partnership with the Longmont Downtown Development Authority.
We are stronger together. We are #strongmont.
Welcome back, Longmont.
