Belonging was the theme the SFN story distilled to, and this video was one piece of the marketing campaign designed to overcome political climate and boost SFN attendance.
With international abstract submissions down in some areas almost 40% for their 2017 Annual Meeting, the Society for Neuroscience had great concern about a potential equivalent drop in international registrations due to:
• Growing, or at least more prevalent anti-science sentiment in the U.S.
• Fears that the U.S. travel ban would significantly discourage potential international attendees from registering (and attending).
• Concerns about how welcoming Washington D.C. might be to its international attendees.
Story Mapping
We used our Story Mapping approach to distill, to a single page, the ‘story of the show’ – so no matter what piece of communication SFN had developed (internally, or by partners like The Expo Group) the key value proposition, supporting evidence and foundational values remained consistent throughout – delivering a consistent show brand experience.
We developed this Story Map that came from combining attendee research and a data nugget from the association’s CEO around the idea of Belonging – that the connection attendees make with one another to help 1 Billion people worldwide suffering fromneurological disorders was THE reason they attended the show.
Using these insights, we built an Attendee Registration Video (see above).
We also built Attendee Registration Campaigns to drive potential attendees to the video and to register.
Results
Through this approach, and despite a challenging environment, SfN ended up attracting over 30,000 attendees from 80 countries – nearly 10% more than anticipated!
To see other case studies like this one, visit here.
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