Football Player of the Week Campaign Scores 350K Votes

The Execution

The first thing we did was secure a roster of local businesses to sponsor the promotion. Though our sponsors ranged from a pizzeria to a university to a law firm, they shared two important qualities:

1. They wanted to show their involvement in the community
2. They wanted to reaching an audience of families

Here’s how the contest worked:

• Every Monday during the high school football season, we nominated 5 area football players and posted them on our website. We made sure to include players from both large and small schools in order to represent the entire community.
• Listeners could then vote up to 100x per day for their favorite players.
• Each week’s winner received a plaque and an invitation to a banquet held at the end of football season.

Our community loves its high school football teams (we have fifteen in Springfield alone!), so we wanted our advertisers to be able to tap into that fan passion. Promotion was key to driving participants to the contest page. We leveraged the promotional power of all six of our stations across multiple platforms with:

• On-air promotion
• Frequent posts on our Facebook Page and Twitter account
• Exposure on all six websites
• Emails and text messages

We ended the promotion with a bang by hosting a banquet dinner for the six winners and their friends and family. This perfectly epitomized our (and our advertisers’) ultimate goal of running a promotion that focused on our community and the people that make it great.