Boys and Girls Clubs of America Empowers over 4,100 Local Affiliates with Marketing Resources

The Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) has been helping children reach their potential for more than 150 years. Character development has been the cornerstone of the Boys & Girls Club experience since the first Club opened in 1860. This noble cause has spread throughout the United States to urban areas, suburbs, military bases, and native lands. There are now more than 4,100 club locations and over 4 million children and teens are served in a single year alone. Through campaigns and awareness programs, the BGCA spreads their message to reach more communities.

The Challenge

The BGCA’s goal is to become the #1 youth advocate by serving even more kids and one of the best ways to accomplish that is through brand awareness. When executing their marketing programs, it’s crucial that the brand be consistent across all clubhouses and touchpoints. This is where BGCA ran into two major challenges:

• Many inconsistencies across brand assets
• A lack of marketing resources/skills to support the large amount of programs nationwide

This meant that the way the brand was being communicated to the public wasn’t consistent. BGCA would often see various versions of the organization’s logo that were either the wrong size, color, wording, etc. and they knew they needed a way to standardize assets across their many locations. Also, many of these locations were working with small operating budgets and less than 15% of club professionals had marketing backgrounds. The BGCA needed a way to empower them.

Ideally their solution would be a one-stop marketing shop for all club professionals that was extremely easy to access, download information, customize materials for local audiences, and provide marketing training for local clubs.

Why MarcomCentral

After a few months of research, BGCA narrowed it down to three marketing asset management vendors and ultimately selected MarcomCentral. Meredith Carter Moore, Senior Director Local Marketing, Boys and Girls Clubs of America explained “MarcomCentral provided us with everything we needed and everything we wanted to give our club professionals.”

It was important that when they implemented their new site (marketing portal) that it look like a BGCA property with proper branding that included bright, bold colors that reflected the vibrancy of the organization. They were able to accomplish this with the interface design flexibility that MarcomCentral provides. It was also critical that users be able to seamlessly move from the intranet to the new site, so the BGCA implemented the single sign-on feature ensuring a smooth user experience.

One of the more popular aspects of their new site is the Search option. Club professionals can locate a particular resource quickly and also see a thumbnail preview prior to selecting and downloading the resource, which has saved users a great deal of time that was previously spent searching. “This feature has received tremendous positive feedback from our club professionals and we’re thrilled to hear it’s helping them,” said Moore.

The Results Speak for Themselves

Within their marketing site, BGCA now provides a photo library, templates, videos/PSAs, non-customizable logos, and training materials in multiple languages. All these assets are properly branded and can be customized where appropriate for target audiences. This allows local clubs with modest operating budgets to look as if they have an entire creative design team on staff.

The BGCA took advantage of the ability to track what club professionals were downloading and customizing through the reporting feature in MarcomCentral. Moore and team were able to see what resources were the most popular and those that were not, which helped them make quick adjustments to campaigns and provide users with the right materials. The most frequently used feature on the site? The logo creator. Multiple options for properly branded logos are now available which has essentially eliminated all the off-brand logo usage.

“An individual on our team regularly runs reports to track the number of downloads of particular assets and with this information we can expand and further develop our best performers,” stated Moore.

MarcomCentral has provided the Boys and Girls Clubs of America with a way to empower their club professionals in order to reach their ultimate goal of serving more youth nationwide.