This initiative marked Giants of Africa's (GOA) triumphant return to Africa. The Built Within Tour followed GOA throughout the trip, building excitement and momentum as the team moved from country to country.
The Built Within Tour campaign focused on these three objectives:
Mark the return of GOA to the continent after two years on hiatus due to COVID.
Tell the story of 11 basketball courts constructed in five different countries. But more importantly, to tell the unique story of how the different communities were positively impacted by the court builds.
To kick off and build momentum for GOA's commitment to constructing 100 courts on the continent.
GOA's work in running camps and building courts can only touch a small amount of youth in Africa, but social media can cast GOA's message much further.
GOA's mission is to use basketball to educate and enrich the lives of African youth. Basketball camps — one tool in their arsenal — emphasize hard work, accountability, honest living and positivity. And, the basketball courts create opportunities not only for basketball players but also for entire communities. Through social media, we want to show the positive impact that basketball has both on and off the court and inspire African youth to dream big.
The construction of 11 courts in five countries was a massive undertaking, so our strategy involved inviting our audience on tour with us. We showcased the stories of the individual communities impacted; these were emotional, affecting narratives. And we shared behind-the-scenes stories of what it was like for the GOA team to conduct this excursion, drawing the audience in with intimate pieces of content.
To execute, we created a series of 18 short, social-media-specifically designed episodes that followed a storytelling framework. With Instagram being the primary platform, where GOA's audience of youth in Africa is most active, we adapted episodes for both feed and stories.
The storytelling framework ensured we captured:
1. Each community's backstory before GOA arrived
2. The unique features of each court, custom-designed for each community with cultural artwork
3. The community impact
The framework helped us achieve our objectives but still left spontaneity for the crews on the ground to find the compelling or unique threads that weave throughout the stories.
GOA is primarily based in Toronto because the founder is Masai Ujiri, Vice-Chairman and President of the Toronto Raptors. Under his leadership, the initiative contained the excitement, adventure, stories, and impact that you would expect from a sports team on the road.
The timeline proved challenging. The courts were unveiled in under one month; however, this volume of content on that short of timeline would have overwhelmed a social audience. We decided to gradually trickle out the content over a 2.5-month campaign to give the individual courts a chance to shine and extend awareness of the initiative. A further challenge, this campaign held no paid media budget, so we relied entirely on organic reach.
Organic KPI’s:
1 Million Impressions
24,456 Total Engagements
A 16% Increase in Instagram Following
Significant organic audience growth and unprecedented reach and engagement without a media budget made this campaign a huge success. Impressions, reach and engagement spiked significantly over GOA's evergreen averages, meaning we reached more African youth with inspiring content. Engagement in the form of comments and DMs was 55% higher than average, with a large number of people interested in having courts built for their communities.
The amazing content team, following the storytelling framework, captured beautiful moments and stunning visuals. Video completion rates were 25% higher than average, indicating compelling storytelling.
