Challenge
Save the Redwoods League, the nation’s only nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting ancient redwoods throughout their natural range, celebrated its 90th anniversary year in 2008. As a critical component of the anniversary PR campaign, the League challenged LCI to secure major feature coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, the city’s top-circulation daily newspaper. The League had yet to break into the Chronicle in a significant way.

Strategy
LCI’s goal was to generate coverage in the Chronicle that celebrated the League's 90 years of achievement and encouraged meaningful connections with redwoods. The League had identified that first-hand visits to redwood forests serve as critical inspiration to those who join the fight to protect the world’s tallest trees. LCI targeted the Travel Section of the publication as a key opportunity for the League. A feature story in this area of the paper would reach new audiences beyond traditional 'environmentalists' and also position redwood forests and parks as a must-experience destination in California.

LCI learned that the League's Executive Director had met San Francisco Chronicle’s Executive Travel Editor on a vacation cruise several years back and introduced the idea of covering redwoods. The stage was set to transform this idea into meaningful coverage.

As a starting point, LCI and the League provided extensive information on the best places to experience redwoods in California's parks and forests. Our team collaborated with the editor to develop a creative hook for a travel feature story: the search for the world’s tallest tree. Charged with ensuring that Save the Redwoods League featured prominently in the story, LCI secured the League's Executive Director, Ruskin Hartley, to serve as a guide to the editor during a two-day trek through several redwood parks. LCI prepared Ruskin to deliver key messages about the League's 90 years of work during this trip – and also provided 90th anniversary material, historical photos and redwood beauty shots to the editor.

Results
LCI secured the San Francisco Chronicle Travel Section cover, with a total of three stories on redwoods that spanned the cover plus two full pages in the travel section. The feature story on the search for the world's tallest redwood opened with Ruskin Hartley as the lead. The piece provided redwoods travel ideas to readers to encourage continued visitation to redwood parks and forests. The Chronicle also published a stand-alone story on the League's 90th anniversary, with historical photo, which positioned Save the Redwoods League as ‘instrumental' in preserving ancient redwoods and growing the system of redwood parks. The San Francisco Chronicle coverage generated more than $225,000 in ad equivalency and more than 13,000,000 gross impressions.

Click here to read the San Francisco Chronicle coverage.