Government

Case Study: Local Government Fitness Program Grows from Facebook to WordPress

Business Challenge

This local government’s community has an unusually high interest in health and wellness, and its Ecosystem Audit revealed extensive opportunity online. In addition, the government operates fitness centers and has a business interest in engaging the community around fitness. Moreover, the community has numerous health and wellness experts and related businesses the client wanted to support by inviting their participation.

Role

As engagement partner, worked with the Communications Department team to plan, launch and evaluate an eight-week pilot, a branded fitness tips campaign that launched on Facebook and, since response was very enthusiastic, expanded to its own presence on WordPress.

CSRA developed the pilot charter (project plan) that included specific goals, resource requirements, timelines, content strategies, community collaboration process and measurements. Developed several pilot templates that explicitly outlined specific goals, workflows and tools for Champion, Manager and Contributor roles. Notably, community wellness experts were contributors in that they submitted tips in their areas of expertise, which this site publicized.

Rollout

This was the client’s second pilot. It provided daily practical fitness tips that were aligned with three fitness profiles, workout (serious), recreation (social, weekend) and nutrition (sport a background role). The program launched as a custom tab in Facebook and transitioned to WordPress based on favorable results at the pilot’s conclusion.

Since the client operates numerous fitness centers, the team solicited tips from recognized medical and fitness experts, engaging the community around one of the government’s core competencies. Experts included: personal trainers, Pilates instructors, swimming coaches and members of government medical teams as well as a government-affiliated physical and aquatic therapy expert.

CSRA served as co-manager, mentoring the social business team in all phases of planning, interacting and managing the pilot. Notably, this included helping the team sell the pilot to other government departments (i.e. fitness center operations) to get their contributions. CSRA also built the Facebook tab.

Developed highly specialized search tools for each Contributor template, which helped Contributors quickly find items to share in accordance with their content strategies. This helped make each template self-contained and minimized time requirements.

Results

• The Ecosystem Audit’s Stakeholder Analysis and Workstream Analysis enabled the team to solicit and share tips that were immediately relevant to the community’s fitness and lifestyle interests.
• It was gratifying for the client to use its highly successful Facebook Page as a platform whence to launch this pilot.
• As the branded program launched on Facebook, the client’s social business team gained practical knowledge of using a Facebook campaign to test social business concepts before investing in individual presences on separate platforms.
• In this pilot, Contributors served as curators of tips; they solicited tips according to their content strategies; they did not write them. CSRA designed tip contribution processes that the team iterated.
• A key challenge was maintaining a constant flow of high quality tips; the team countered this by broadening the pool of tips experts over time. Began with text-oriented tips, but began introducing videos and photos before the end of the pilot.
• This pilot involved a large team of Contributors, who used their templates as a guide in soliciting tips so we were picking tips that resonated most with our audience.
• The client’s social business team learned WordPress through another pilot, which enabled them to set up a WordPress site for this program by themselves in the post-pilot period. A big score for mentoring!

See also (same client): Social Business Strategy, Facebook Page Launch, Social Event Calendar Launch, and Social Business Governance Program.

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