The Blocking Hunger Foundation was founded after former Dallas Cowboy Center Travis Frederick saw a need to support inner-city and low-income children who struggle with hunger. Blocking Hunger focuses on addressing childhood hunger to ensure that each child has the opportunity to grow into a thriving adult. Despite being one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, Dallas County is the sixth hungriest county in the country.
Blocking Hunger struggled to set themselves apart from other foundations and organizations in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Frederick wanted to change how his nonprofit operated by moving away from large event fundraising that yielded little revenue for the nonprofit. Our team created a new brand name, positioning strategy, visual identity, and key messaging that would better position the foundation towards their new goals.
To cap off the rebrand, Knight Eady worked with Blocking Hunger to launch “Moving the Chains to Block Hunger” - a fundraising campaign to raise $22,500 within 72 days, aptly named after Frederick’s number 72 he wore while on the Cowboys.
Through press releases, media pitches, and announcements given by Travis, the Blocking Hunger Foundation earned stories with local newspapers, radio and TV stations in addition to ESPN and Sports Illustrated that helped garner attention and push us to our goal.
It was crucial to utilize Travis’s name and likeness throughout the campaign. It was important to project strong calls to action and develop awareness based content social media graphics to drive engagement, impressions and, ultimately, donations.
The campaign ran in the middle of the COVID-19 global pandemic, so it was important to create engaging virtual events. We created with a virtual cooking show on Facebook. Donors and social media followers could tune in to learn how to make a dish with a professional chef and would earn the chef’s virtual cookbook by making a donation.
We also conceptualized and implemented a “Tag Your Team” challenge. Followers were encouraged to tag their friends on social media to create a football team and then pushed to make a donation towards the foundation, creating a chain reaction and user generated content.
Lastly, we promoted a social media giveaway that drove followers to engage and donate to the foundation. The success of this campaign came greatly from the organic, engaging and user generated content that put the Blocking Hunger Foundation and the Moving the Chains to Block Hunger at the top of everyone’s mind.
