USA TODAY NETWORK (USATN) is committed to serving local communities through exceptional journalism. But, our journalists not only cover local news, they live it as neighbors, friends and colleagues to those that they serve. To further engage those communities, the USATN launched A Community Thrives (ACT), a program that empowers communities to take local challenges head on. ACT provides a national platform for people to raise awareness of important community issues and solutions that address those challenges.
Through ACT, we award $600K in grants to local organizations and individuals to fund ideas that they have told us will positively impact their communities. But, we do more than just provide grant money. We make sure ideas get seen. We bring communities together. We get people to take action.
Through our partnership with CrowdRise by GoFundMe and our reach as a media organization, our goal was to surface ideas submitted to us on a national platform and provide grant money to a few select organizations based on their ideas and their ability to fundraise the most from their national and local networks. We wanted to not only award grant money, but to give local organizations a louder voice, ensuring that their ideas were heard from people outside of their city limits.
The USA TODAY NETWORK (USATN) is uniquely positioned to give national attention to community issues because of our extensive digital reach. USATN reaches 123MM unique visitors each month across over 100 digital properties in communities across the country. A Community Thrives (ACT) harnessed the power of the USATN by activating editorial teams to produce articles and videos supporting the overall program and launching a targeted advertising campaign on our digital and social platforms.
The program was broken into two phases to ensure we were driving both submissions and fundraising. For the first four weeks, we launched an extensive advertising campaign to drive broad awareness of the campaign and encourage people to submit their ideas to the program. Digital and social ads drove directly to a site that was created in partnership with CrowdRise by GoFundMe. Once there, consumers were able to directly submit their ideas to the program along with any photos or videos that showed exactly what they would do with the grant money. Once accepted to the program, CrowdRise set each project up with a crowdfunding page that served as their personal fundraising hub.
The second phase of the campaign encouraged organizations to tap into their own networks to fundraise for their idea directly through their ACT fundraising page. The phase kicked off with a PR push from USA TODAY, distributing a press release and launching a blog post that drove national interest and attention. Each organization was also provided a toolkit that included creative assets and tips for fundraising so that they all felt empowered to participate in the program. Finally, digital and social ads drove national attention to the fundraising stage by driving to the overall ACT page, where consumers could search through all of the program fundraising pages to learn about each project and donate to causes that they most connected with.
Throughout both phases, we activated our national editorial team from USA TODAY and teams from local media brands across the country to cover the program. Our editorial strategy was meant to drive broad awareness of the program while also encouraging participation and donations to local organizations. Once grants were awarded, local editorial teams produced additional content that put a spotlight on the impact that these organizations were going to achieve in their communities.
Our digital campaign delivered +32MM impressions during its flight. Editorial teams produced 18 pieces of content and published nationally in USA TODAY and across local media brands to generate entries. Both tactics led to 521 submissions from organizations across 45 states with ideas for positively impacting local communities.
We awarded a total of $600K in grants to 15 organizations. This money will be used by a city in Florida to build a community skate park as a way to combat juvenile crime. It will also be used to give underprivileged kids in upstate NY school supplies and arts education. It will help increase literacy rates by connecting incarcerated parents to their children through recordings of them reading their favorite books aloud. And, it will help an underserved Cincinnatti neighborhood build a mini-grocery store, providing access to staple foods to residents living in a food desert. ACT is proud to support such a wide range of organizations from 15 local communities.
To ensure our grant money wasn't the only monetary impact during the campaign, USA TODAY partnered with CrowdRise by GoFundMe for a fundraising portion of the campaign and enlisted people from around the country to donate to all submissions in the program. In total $945,245 was raised for local projects, proving that when communities come together to take action, they can achieve amazing things. Through this fundraising effort and the grants awarded, ACT was responsible for $1.5MM being distributed to local communities.
