WE DID
Objective
With its meteoric rise in the rowing community, coupled with its world-class boathouse with historical origins, White Rock Rowing (WRR) acquired the rights to bring the Texas State Rowing Championships to Dallas, Texas on White Rock Lake after a more than 20-year absence.
WRR, a program of nonprofit White Rock Boathouse, Inc. needed to build awareness of its hosting the event among Dallas high school-aged rowers and their clubs and do a radical introduction of rowing to Dallas community at large.
The critical need was to break through the media clutter of Dallas professional, college, and high school revenue sports football (postseason), baseball, and basketball (Final Four and mid-season professionally) and get on radar. Outside of the rowing community and Lakewood/East Dallas, few are aware that Dallas has a thriving rowing ecosystem, yet alone that there is a lake right in the city.
In addition to producing and hosting the championship, WRR needed to build awareness and stimulate media interest in the Texas State Rowing championship overall while building visibility for itself as the premier rowing organization and thought leader in North Texas and the USA Rowing central region overall.
Approach
To spread the word of WRR’s mission and its leadership role in the 2022 Texas State Rowing Championships, our team secured widespread broadcast media coverage, conducted key collaborations with the Dallas Sports Commission and the Dallas Mayor’s Office to amplify rowing and build community pride, worked with WRR volunteers and coaches to maximize the club’s social media calendar and offered strategic advice and counsel for the overall conduct of the event. The end game of these executions was to have an even more compelling story to share while our team leveraged relationships with key media to secure multiple plum on-air interviews and immersive interviewing opportunities with high profile media personalities.
results
• Dallas Sports Commission Collaboration yielded a stronger reach to overall Dallas Sports enthusiasts and amplified WRR’s social media presence via tagging.
• Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson’s Proclamation for Texas State Rowing Championship Day at WRR increased marquee value and perception of event among media journalists and bloggers.
• Media Training yielded consistent messaging and a unified voice for WRR in all interviews.
• Secured earned media placements in key Dallas hyperlocal and neighborhood print publications: Advocate Magazine, Dallas Doing Good, White Rock Weekly and Community Impact Newspaper.
• Featured placements with four of the major DFW broadcast stations: ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox – This included live televised segments during the regatta as well as interviews with the WRR team leading up to the championship weekend. Segments aired up to three times during news morning editions.
• Extensive coverage and multiple interviews with Spectrum News, including a 10-minute feature during its weekend sports magazine.
• Total reach of media was 24.28 million with an ad equivalency of $73.49K and garnered Facebook engagement of 1.6K with the stories shared on news.