Challenge:
San Francisco Ballet hired LCI to raise the national visibility of the company with a 75^th Anniversary campaign that not only heralded its rich history but celebrated its innovations in the world of dance. The 2008 anniversary season, however, coincided with a steady downsizing in dance coverage for regional and local news outlets throughout the country. A mass-market medium in a niche-market communications world, newspapers continued to shrink and arts coverage suffered significantly as the Internet and special media carved away at the traditional audience. Additionally, most influencers and media did not know that San Francisco is home to “America’s oldest ballet company.”

Strategy:
With declining arts coverage in mind, LCI leveraged the 75^th Anniversary news hook and “oldest ballet company” message as an opportunity to plan and execute a New York media tour which laid the foundation for national coverage. We approached national print, broadcast and online news outlets with stories about individual dancers and choreographers participating in the traditional season as well as a New Works Festival in April of 2008. The 75^th anniversary itself, as well as the Festival, which featured world premiere works from 10 distinguished choreographers, provided an opportunity for LCI to target top tier media outlets. Results ran in such publications as Vanity Fair, New York Times, Elle Magazine, Playbill, and Town and Country.

LCI’s recommendation locally was to acquaint San Francisco Chronicle’s Editorial Board as well as entertainment, society and style editors with the significance of the Company on both a regional and international scale. LCI set a meeting with key editors and the Ballet’s management team in August of 2007, a full five months before the start of the anniversary season, and used the meeting to suggest more than 20 story ideas and events that were prime for ongoing coverage.

Recognizing the opportunity to reach out to niche outlets and meet the audience where it lives, LCI made it a primary goal to provide a New Media PR plan and to access the online community so that bloggers and web-based news editors were made aware of key messages and season highlights. LCI worked in partnership with the Ballet to stage a “bloggers only” event for the seasonal Nutcracker performance to introduce the new media journalists to the company. The event and continued efforts helped foster qualitative relationships with relevant online contributors.

Results:
A mark of success in any national PR campaign is the intersection of key messages and story ideas which reach fresh media targets. LCI’s efforts contributed to record box office sales, and successfully raised both the visibility of the company and identity of the San Francisco Ballet as America’s oldest ballet company -- resulting in national media coverage as well as new introductions and relationships facilitated at more than 20 major outlets including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Architectural Digest, Harper’s Bazaar, Seventeen, Vanity Fair and CBS Sunday Morning, among others.

Despite slow and steady cutbacks at the San Francisco Chronicle, the news for San Francisco Ballet was excellent. Quantitative coverage of the company’s 75^th season (as measured by Lexis-Nexis) rose by an impressive 7% and overall Chronicle coverage of the company rose 30% from the previous year.

Increased attention to national and local online media was rewarded with a 5% raise in coverage from the 2007 season.