For the past 4 years, Impact Communications has worked with the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation to develop an advertising campaign to promote their annual Nova Scotia Responsible Gambling Conference and Responsible Gambling Awareness Week. The Conference and Awareness Week are both part of a united effort to raise awareness on responsible gambling with both the general public and industry professionals. Although both campaigns parallel in the overall message, Impact Communications works to develop key messages that resonate with two distinctively different audiences.
This was a two-tiered strategy with two main objectives: (1) Increase the number of industry-specific conference attendees, and (2) Raise awareness on responsible gambling throughout the province with the general public.
To decrease the number of non-gaming industry personnel (i.e. anti-gaming lobby groups, addiction services, etc), the opportunity lied in working with NSGC’s internal stakeholder list, as well as building a database of industry professionals throughout Canada and Eastern parts of the United States. The challenge was building a highly targeted database that would reach the appropriate industry professionals. The focus of Nova Scotia Gambling Conference 2008 became the direct mail campaign, which included multiple direct touch points with the target publics. The strategy was designed to support the objective of increasing industry-related attendees. It was also equally important to raise awareness on responsible gambling in the local (provincial) market. The advertising campaign targeted communities that were hosting NSGC’s travelling road show, with print and radio advertisements in these local communities. The advertising campaign was designed to inform Nova Scotians within these communities of when and where the road show would be and highlight NSGC’s efforts to raise awareness on responsible gambling to Nova Scotians.
After last year’s RGAW conference, one of the keynote speakers, Dr. Jeffrey L. Derevensky, co-director, International Centre for Youth Gambling and professor of Problems and High-Risk Behaviours at McGill University, wrote NSGC praising them for the quality and professionalism of the conference. This is not a ‘quantifiable’ outcome,but helps to illustrate how much NSGC and Impact have done to improve public perception. “Your team and sincere commitment to social responsibility is most impressive. Having now been engaged in this field for a good number of years as well as having worked with many corporations, government agencies foundations and research centers, the leadership you and your senior management team have shown is exemplary and well noticed internationally,” (Dr. Jeffrey L. Derevensky, Professor & Co-Director, International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviours, McGill University). According to a survey conducted with conference attendees, 24% learned about the conference through direct mail, 22% through the conference website, 13% from email and 41% from other sources (mainly friends/colleagues who attended in the past).
