Hillsborough County is number one for children in foster care in Florida. Heart Gallery of Tampa helps local foster children find their forever homes. By capturing their photos and placing them online, and around spaces in Tampa, they are able to bring awareness and help these children find what they need most, a family.

Heart Gallery of Tampa also helps foster children have a more normal life by giving them birthday events, the opportunity to participate in extracurriculars at school, and opportunities for non-school related activities (summer camps, traveling sports teams, band competitions, etc.).

However, a lack of committed volunteers was a major pain point for Heart Gallery of Tampa, so this year’s Ad 2 Tampa Bay Public Service Committee created a campaign around a specific group of people more willing to share their time over money.

 

Our campaign goal was simple:

Attract at least five community members to volunteer efforts for a specific time frame (ex: six months) of volunteer efforts. This includes providing a secondary database or list of volunteers to call on for offhand volunteer events and initiatives, leaving the door open for non-committed community members to make a long-term commitment to volunteer for Heart Gallery at a later date.

 

With the help of additional volunteers who are committed to a month or more of volunteer efforts, at least doubling the manpower of the 5 full-time employees currently running all quality of life duties, Heart Gallery could have the opportunity to expand their current initiatives.

We wanted to give our target audience the sense that with small commitments, they could be part of something much bigger. Our primary campaign headline, “Be Part of the Heart” captured this idea perfectly.

 

COVID RESPONSE

On March 1st, our governor announced the first two Floridians to test positive for coronavirus, one of whom was located in Tampa Bay. Soon after, restaurants began to shut down, schools and universities closed, and residents were told to stay inside. How does a campaign to drive volunteers work with social distancing? How can we promote the Heart Gallery’s initiatives when they require volunteers to leave their homes? These were some of the questions we contemplated as we began running not just an advertising campaign but a crisis management operation. Luckily, we were able to pivot our campaign without drastically changing our goal of gaining the Heart Gallery at least 5 committed volunteers.

 

Estimated Value of the Campaign: $125,000

Cost to Heart Gallery of Tampa: $0

 

To learn more about Heart Gallery of Tampa, click here.