CASE STUDY:  Paradigm

When a feminine hygiene brand wanted to hear what girls had to say about high school sports programs, we were able to tap into the mind of the young female athlete, letting our client emotionally drive real-life videos and a grant program to help Canadian girls play on. They reached the decision-makers while strategically planning the program’s promotion.

HOW WE DID IT

Playtex Sport Canada had a vision for a media relations campaign about the need to "Enable girls to play on," in light of the inequality between boys and girls high school sports programs. In order to level the playing field a bit, they decided to offer a $5000 grant to a school that could really use some help supporting their female athletes. To be able to successfully carry out this plan, Playtex needed data to support what high school girls are anecdotally saying about the inequality of their school sport situation to use for a kickoff video for the campaign.

When we first heard Playtex’s goals to make some videos with new and accurate statistics, we knew we wanted to hear what our high school athletes had to say, and the best way to do that in a survey is through open-ended questions. We crafted some unbiased questions to hear these voices and identify their role in solving the problem.

We used an online survey to help Playtex Sport Canada quickly identify how many girls felt limited in their high school sport experience and their reasons and feelings around that topic. To capture the high school experience across a longer time period, we used two groups to report on findings: current high schoolers, and already graduated (hindsight is 20/20) across a representative scope of Canadian girls/women

To get Playtex Sport Canada their data as soon as we could--which would help launch the grant program as soon as possible--we sent the survey out to our two groups of athletes for 11 days. We teamed up with a Canadian blog to advertise the survey and helped boost our participation through a couple of our favorite panels. Our goal was to survey nearly 600 young female athletes, and by the end of our 11 days, we had successfully surveyed over 700.

The most interesting part of a survey is usually the analysis process--our nerdy pleasure. A general trend was found in the responses, letting us tell the story of a representative of general survey respondents. Her story describes her feelings about school sports, and what she feels limited by. We learned more about the reasoning behind participating in non-school sports and the dissatisfaction of what the schools are able to offer to female athletes. In most of Canada, there is severe inequality between athletic options for boys and girls--and we heard this over and over through their voices.  

Knowing more about the real-life struggles of high school female athletes, Paradigm PR had the great opportunity to create an amazing campaign surrounding their grant program to boost girl athletes’ opportunities to reach their full potential. 

 With words directly from the athletes, Paradigm PR made some amazingly compelling videos to promote their grant program. 

We were also able to conduct another survey with them to help plan the best use for their grant money to make the biggest impact on equalizing sports opportunities for girls. Our analysis also showed us that there is much more work to do, 

 but that every little thing will make a positive difference.

Their videos garnered support from hundreds of high school programs, far exceeding their goals for the impact it would have on Canadian high schools