Regan Conley Communications
Kiewit Bridge & Marine and Bridges to Prosperity
Creating a fast internal PR campaign for a corporate volunteer project built buzz and new partnerships
Kiewit Bridge & Marine (a specialist division of the Fortune 500 construction company) teamed up with Bridges to Prosperity, a nonprofit that builds footbridges in isolated communities, to build a bridge in Nicaragua. KB&M assigned one of the volunteer engineers to tackle fundraising and PR before departure and during the build. The brief was to make the entire division feel involved. She and her fellow volunteers gained support from the division president for creative ideas, such as live streaming the entire two-week build. With just three months before departure, including the winter holidays, they turned to the marketing team for assistance with putting their ideas into action.
Project Services
PR campaign development
Strategic messaging
Internal communications
Campaign collateral
Partnership development
Copywriter
Ghostwriter
Markets
Bridge construction
Heavy civil construction
Infrastructure
Fortune 500
Nonprofit
Employee Communications
International development
Nicaragua
Approach
The marketing team started by helping the volunteers clarify their goals and realistically scale ideas. The outcome was a small fundraising campaign to support the community school in Nicaragua, ways to keep family and colleagues informed of progress, and building interest and engagement with employees for follow-on projects.
To launch with minimal development time and cost, we created a simple campaign that relied mainly on existing resources and planned events, like the internal social networking system ("Pulse"), upcoming annual meeting and the employee magazine.
The fundraising campaign was announced via email and Pulse. Employees who donated were given stickers that proclaimed "I'm building the el Limón bridge — build with us!" Stickers quickly began to pop up on cubicles, water bottles, hard hats and field notebooks, helping to spread the word organically.
Information kiosks were re-purposed with new panels and staged in central locations at the district and annual meetings. Senior leadership followed the project on Pulse to build an initial following for the project account and regular updates kept interest going. We posted daily updates during the build.
As interest and excitement built, corporate communications offered media relations with support from their national PR agency. When both the promised live streaming and time lapse photography were ruled out a few weeks before departure due to cost and logistics, corporate communications offered to fill the gap with daily Facebook and Instagram posts, if the assigned engineer sent them photos and daily updates.
After the build, we published an article in the employee magazine to share with staff what their efforts had produced and to build interest in a new project the following year.
My work included:
Leading the marketing team to create and implement the campaign
Message development and the "Build with Us" tagline
Coordinating with corporate communications
Copywriting for the kiosks, including the project description, community story and volunteer bios
Writing and ghostwriting email updates, social media posts and the magazine article
Results
The immediate successes included employee donations of more than $1,000 to buy maps, textbooks, sports equipment and other supplies for the local school. Staff from across the entire 9,000-employee corporation signed up to follow the project on Pulse.
The long-term impacts were bigger:
Overall buzz expanded to other divisions and even other AEC companies that wanted to partner with KB&M on future builds for Bridges to Prosperity. KB&M repeated the project annually for several years, each time with a different engineering firm as partner.
In 2016, Kiewit and partner COWI Bridge won the Award of Excellence in Outreach from the Canadian Consulting Engineers
KB&M connected other companies with Bridges to Prosperity, which led to more corporate sponsorship for the nonprofit