AFP Conference Roundup: Six Best Practices for Balancing New and Traditional Media

Some examples
The Nature Conservancy is an example of an organization that leveraged relationships to pursue a big idea. Three baseball team owners sit on the organization's board, so the organization worked with them to do an awareness-building campaign about sustainable forestry at the three teams' ballparks. They put a green stripe on the baseball bats used during the games and advertised the campaign during the games.

Keep Indianapolis Beautiful's My Tree & Me campaign is a tree-planting initiative that also stood apart from the noise. Community members were mailed a coupon for $20 off the purchase of a tree at local partner stores. The mailing included a reply card where participants could note the location where they planted their tree and mail it back to the organization. Keep Indianapolis Beautiful mapped where all of the trees were planted so that participants could see the impact they had. The organization plans to make the campaign an annual event and will begin by mailing everyone involved last year.

Samaritan's Feet is an organization that strives to put shoes on the feet of children around the world that was founded by Manny Ohonme, who received his first pair of shoes growing up in Africa at the age of 9 from a missionary. Thanks to that pair of shoes, Ohonme started playing basketball, an activity that ended up earning him a scholarship to the University of North Dakota (Lake Region) where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees.

The organization leveraged Ohonme's connection to basketball and was able to get Ron Hunter, coach of the Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis basketball team, to coach a game in bare feet to raise awareness for the organization.

This year, Hunter was joined by nearly 1,000 basketball coaches who all coached a game in their bare feet during the weekend of January 16 to 18. Their collected efforts raised more than one million pairs of shoes.