BORN TO RUN: A STORY OF ITERATION
The promo video opened with our 22- year-old Prison Fellowship intern Topher sitting in front of a rustic red barn, asking, “Well, why not be a PF Racer?”
He went on to make the case to “help a group of kids who often get overlooked” — the 1.7 million children of prisoners in America.
The 2012 video continued with other young "PF Racers" Jason, Derek, Elizabeth, Patrick, and Jenni talking about why they participated in the 10-mile obstacle course race on behalf of Prison Fellowship, how they felt God with them every step of the way, and how these children of prisoners need our help.
And then, after a bit of tension had built up, creating curiosity about what this PF Racing thing actually is, Switchfoot’s rugged and anthemic “The War Inside” kicked in. The scenes changed to intense, in-race footage of PF Racers taking on the brutal, muddy, and exhausting Spartan Race in Leesburg, Virginia, followed by an invitation to join us at the next race.
Q&A
Q: Have you considered how you might give your audience a true adventure?
A: Remember that there are many different types of adventures (not just physical) you might offer your people.
How did we find ourselves in all this mud and sweat?
What had become the promising flame of PF Racing started two years earlier, in 2010.
As head of Prison Fellowship’s marketing and general donor fundraising, as well as being an endurance athlete, I admired World Vision’s impressive Team World Vision, which raised funds by providing a great team experience at select marathons across the country.
By 2010, tons of organizations offered peer-to-peer fundraising experiences through 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, and marathons.
I didn’t want Prison Fellowship to seem an also-ran alongside all those other organizations.
And I knew that the research showed how the more difficult the race, the more funding participating athletes were able to raise.
Q&A
Q: What are the amazing opportunities that other brands provide to their audience members?
A: Remember that your audience might love your own twist on that same opportunity, if you take the time to discover what that twist might be for them.
Not every trend works for your audience
First, I looked at triathlon, encouraged by an Ad Age article that declared it to have supplanted golf as the sport of the C-suite.
But every triathlon-based plan I put together ran into two problems:
Opportunity: Startup programs require a passionate person who can quickly mobilize people in his or her circle to join them in the endeavor. I was passionate about both triathlon and PF, but the people in my circle either loved triathlon or loved PF, but none at all possessed both passions.
Demographics: Triathlon is an expensive sport. Entry-level gear costs at least $2,000, and the cheapest races come in around $250 per entry. That was an obvious and significant hurdle for the younger audience we were targeting.
That's when — out of nowhere — I discovered obstacle course racing (OCR).
As I recounted in the previous newsletter:
In late 2010, at my local running store, I picked up a brochure for the nascent Spartan Race OCR series, which headlined its brochure with “You might die!”
It showed images of people crawling through mud, hauling themselves up over enormous walls, climbing up ropes, and various other forms of endurance-based suffering.
I thought, "WHAT. IS. THIS???”
OCR generally — and Spartan Race events in particular — seemed like a great match for what we needed, for a number of reasons:
This was a truly new and unique experience.
The grittiness of Spartan Race felt like an intriguing brand match.
We were clearly on the front end of a building consumer trend.
These races were doable but also very hard, which helped with fundraising.
With no gear but running shoes needed, there was a very low barrier to entry for cash-strapped participants.
Q&A
Q: Are you engaging in trendspotting for inspiration for fresh experiences and strategies?
A: Often, what seems like a “dead end” idea proves to be the starting point for a much better one.
Launching the first market test
For all these reasons, I pulled together a first test of the audience demand for PF Racing.
Because Spartan Race was making and posting story-driven videos of their races, I decided to try to make PF Racing the story of that race’s video. I figured if I showed up with the biggest team they’d yet seen in their nascent (and individually focused) race, we had a chance.
I called Spartan Race and gave them my best pitch, and members of our team of 20 or so did end up featured on that video.
Spartan Race also constantly updated everyone about the progress of “The Prison Fellowship Team” (sometimes just “the prison team” — heh) over the PA system throughout the race.
Our teammates loved both the race and the team experience, with several of them wanting to race again.
I knew we were on to something.
Q&A
Q: Are you willing to try small-scale initial efforts to see if a fresh audience experience idea has potential?
A: Remember that startup efforts often require you to roll up your sleeves and participate in a hands-on, spade-in-the-dirt sort of way.
Testing Version 2 of the new experience
In the summer of 2011, we brought on a couple of interns to specifically help with PF Racing: Topher, a multitalented artist, and Jenni, both a skilled copywriter and a NCAA Division I track athlete.
They were an intriguing pair whom we believed could contribute something important toward an improved version of the PF Racing experience.
And at summer-intern pay rates, they perfectly matched the utterly paltry budget I had for this new peer-to-peer fundraising effort.
Topher and Jenni were fantastic and, with a little branding help from our agency, created amazing content for every part of the audience journey, with a great vibe and gritty visuals that appealed to the young, adventurous fundraiser audience to whom we wanted to appeal.
By August of that year, we were ready for an improved second spin at PF Racing.
With Topher and Jenni recruiting other young people at Prison Fellowship and in their own social circles, we again ended up with one of the largest teams at the Spartan Race event.
With this event, we confirmed some key hypotheses that we’d had going in:
A participant could reasonably expect to raise $2,000 for Prison Fellowship.
Connecting the peer-to-peer fundraising opportunity to sponsoring kids for Angel Tree camp was key for driving donor participation.
In order to finish the experience with the crucial team vibe, we needed to step away from the loud Spartan Race environment for a team wrap-up that felt true to the purpose for which everyone raced and fundraised.
Q&A
Q: Do you regularly collect hypotheses for how to improve the audience experience?
A: Make sure that you publish audience insights in a disciplined way and share them across your organization.
Scaling up requires creative problem-solving
During the second Spartan Race event, Topher teamed up with a video producer to create a great promo video of PF Racers to recruit new participants.
We now had what we needed to recruit beyond our own circle:
Proven, killer race experience for the Young Adventurer audience
Spot-on branding, including name, language, voice, and imagery
A good reputation with Spartan Race while also limiting dependency upon them
An easy-to-use fundraising platform
Demonstrated demand among the target audience
Audience journey components: promo video, dedicated social channel, peer-to-peer account setup and directions, welcome kit to new PF Racers, awesome race shirts, and promo table pieces
As social media was only a few years old and not yet a great recruitment channel, we concentrated our initial promotion test efforts on a purpose-driven conference for young people.
By running the wild and adventurous video on a large screen at our promo table — and staffing the table with our super-winsome PF Racing interns — we provided a word-of-mouth effect among participants that helped the recruiting test punch above its weight class.
Soon, we had several PF Racing teams participating in Spartan Races around the country, led by people outside of our own circles, proving that the opportunity was not dependent upon our direct participation and could scale, with enough dedicated effort.
It was 18 months in, and PF Racing — a truly unique audience experience that had real demand and drove participation with our brand — looked like it was going to be the next big thing.
Q&A
Q: Are you regularly working on at least a couple new strategies that might be your organization’s Next Big Thing?
A: Be ready for scaling up to require a lot of iteration based upon trial and error.
NOOOOOooooo!
PF Racing was clearly poised to take off.
But then…it didn’t.
The tale of its demise is an all-too-familiar tale of nonprofit woe: the itemized, top-down command from the C-suite to cease and desist, due to cost-cutting.
But the story of that losing battle is for another newsletter (or, more likely, for us to discuss over coffee). And, actually, I have little doubt that the more recent administrations for that storied organization would have allowed PF Racing to flourish, given their dogged and successful efforts to innovate over the past decade.
I hope you can take three things from the PF Racing story:
Bringing on a new audience in a way that will maximize participation requires an exceptional new experience. There’s a reason they’re not your audience yet. You can change that.
Not every experience trend fits your audience. At any given time, there are hundreds of identifiable experience trends. Explore the ones that fit your brand, audience, capabilities, and resources.
Top executives must establish and defend a culture of institutional patience for new efforts (or decide they don’t do new things and are willing to accept slow decline). This is hard for many organizations, who are too often overly focused on the current fiscal year. “Fail fast” does not mean “kill that promising new strategy that hasn’t quite exploded with success yet.”
A fourth takeaway could be that if you’re looking for a friend to join you on an epic adventure, I just might be your guy.
Which reminds me: Wonder Camp is October 15-17 in Carefree, AZ. Join us there. If you want to stay an extra day for a Grand Canyon adventure, let’s make it happen!
Allen
allen@sublimity.co
571.283.8283
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Various & Sundry
Thinking about it from the SUBLIMITY Audience Experience (AX) Schema perspective, PF Racing was an expression of 2 of the 12 different schema types: "Live at Red Rocks” and “Finish Line.”
My SUBLIMITY colleague Katie Hawkins (in her World Vision days) took Team World Vision from a Chicago-based project to a nationwide phenomenon. So when she left World Vision, right around the time I was working on the second iteration of PF Racing, you can imagine how quickly I pounced to get her invaluable help. You, too, can similarly pounce! Katie is a key member of our experience development team and will be at Wonder Camp 2024 next month to help you with your own new AX strategy. We only have a few spots still available, so act fast to join us.
Trends away from religious belief are always of great interest in our sector. This research summary from Ryan Burge is helpful in compiling a profile of the typical “None” today: quickly gave up faith as an older teen or young adult, has a None sibling, most relates to the “freethinker” label but also doesn’t think of having a label, and perceives The Church as making no sense and causing harm through hypocrisy. And yet you can also see in the data that…well…really, there IS no single profile. Not even close. And that, my friends, is why I so often find myself saying to confounded marketers: “Welcome to people!”
I don’t typically write about my marketing analytics career because so many other people write about data-driven marketing. But some people have appreciated my three-part blog series on how A/B split testing is sometimes inadvertently misused or misinterpreted, even by well-trained data-driven practitioners.
