Putting the Indianapolis Zoological Society at the heart of conservation

The Challenge

The Indianapolis Zoological Society engaged FleishmanHillard Fishburn (FHF) to enhance the reputation and profile of its coveted Indianapolis Prize for environmental conservation, ahead of the 2018 awards ceremony.

Since first being awarded in 2006, the Indianapolis Prize has sought to make heroes out of animal conservationists but had struggled to maximise awareness of its profile and goals on the global stage.

With an increasing urgency to meet the conservation goals of the Indianapolis Society, we were asked to create an international PR platform for the prize, enabling the society to advance awareness of its work across research and habitat preservation.

The Solution

We partnered with a research agency to carry out a perception audit to assess the strengths and gaps of the society’s existing reputation across media, digital and stakeholder channels.

Ahead of the awards ceremony, we created a global tier-one media briefing program, targeting outlets such as USA Today and The Guardian with one on one interviews and reworked content, which projected the impact of the society’s work and a powerful call to action.

We also created a bespoke social media campaign, targeting ads and thought leadership content at conservation stakeholders across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. The content created and the stories developed were aimed at engaging these specific audiences and included facts and figures that showed how important conservation is.

Part of this was to challenge outdated perceptions of conservation through access to the prize winners who shared their stories of championing the small guys and saving fragile ecosystems.

The final element of our campaign was to engage third party influencers at industry events, including celebrities and academics. Through keynote speeches and fringe-events, we created advocacy partnerships that championed conservation, the work of the Indianapolis Prize nominees and Zoological Society.

The Results

Our media, stakeholder and digital campaign elevated the work of the 2018 prize winner, Dr Mittermeier, the profile of the Indianapolis Prize and the society’s conservation agenda to the global stage.

We secured more than 1.96 billion earned media impressions, three national broadcast opportunities, six opinion piece articles, and exceeded 1.4 million impressions through digital advertisements targeted at specific stakeholder audiences.