BeeCause
Celebrating 20 Years in the Hive

HONEY celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2009 and to mark the milestone, our team wanted to demonstrate our passion for marketing communications with a cause related campaign. In a year of economic recession a celebration with a cause seemed most appropriate. An artist friend of the firm works with bees and hives to create her pieces, and in passing mentioned the issue of bee colony collapse. Matching the bee theme, inherent in HONEY’s brand, with the Canadian Bee Research Fund resulted in BeeCause, a fundraising campaign and event. The event would feature 20 works of art for auction, with all funds raised to be split evenly between the Canadian Bee Research Fund and The ARTS Project.

The campaign spanned seven months, starting with the Call for Entries. The branding centred on the BeeCause seal, a circular icon, reminiscent of a label design for a jar of honey. First priority was designing, writing, and developing the website. Attracting artwork for consideration was our next step. The Call for Entries announced the art contest component of the campaign in a press release on April 7, 2009. To generate more word-of-mouth buzz, and support the Call for Entries promotion, we launched the BeeCause Facebook page and started inviting fans and regularly updating information. Updates included features of new and interesting artwork in the gallery; BeeCause stickers that had mysteriously appeared all over downtown London, Ontario; Bee-shirt previews from The Hive models; and links to press releases throughout the campaign. A HONEY Twitter handle, @honeylondon, was used for BeeCause updates to drive traffic to the Facebook page and our website. To support the credibility of our contest we released an announcement on May 4, 2009, of the online gallery launch, featuring our first contest entry. The artist who helped launch the online gallery was Aganetha Dyck, who is a Canadian Governor General Award in Media and Visual Arts recipient.

BeeCause marketing communications tactics included: Media Relations, Website, Facebook page and Facebook PPC Advertising, Twitter, Guerilla Marketing, Print Advertising, Promotional Bee-shirts, Email and Print Invitations, and branded Event Signage. The campaign clearly demonstrated a multidisciplinary campaign that included: creative design, communications excellence, media-agnostic marketing.

BeeCause raised almost $10,000, nearly doubling our original goal. The call for entries attracted a total of 140 works for consideration from 70 individual artists. As a result of the high quality submissions, we increased the auction to 20 works for live auction and three silent auction pieces. The art sales alone raised, $6,575.

We secured sponsorship from nine vendors: Pattison Outdoor, Phibbs Printing, Compex Display Signage, Billy Bee Honey, Sleeman’s Honey Brown Ale, 20 Bees Winery, Munroe Honey and Meadery, Fresh Ink and Graphica Event Planning. Additionally, a client who could not attend the event donated $200 cash prior to the event. In kind and cash donations totaled approximately $5,200.

Publicity was also successful with positive, on-message features in print: The Globe and Mail (with photo in print and online), The London Free Press, Artscape magazine, Hive lights (two articles); and, broadcast: CHRW Radio (UWO), CBC Radio, Ontario Morning (Robin Honey was interviewed by Wei Chen), and on A TV News with Janice Zolf.