The Chung Report
The courage to face hard truths.
This editorial content site was a collaboration between Fidelity Bank and our team at Idea Ranch. It came as a response to a research report created by Economist James Chung about the future of Wichita. The report revealed a sobering reality. Significant decline in entrepreneurs. A talent vacuum. Decaying white-collar jobs. Negative perceptions. All leading to an unacceptably dismal future.
This Chung Report site and the immense volume of content created over the next four years was our collective response to the challenge. The strategic focus was to keep these topics top of mind and push local leaders, elected officials and the business community to both engage with the content and be challenged by it’s direct, no-nonsense approach to topics that often had been ignored or swept under the rug by those groups.
We launched to key stakeholders through more traditional mediums - print, digital & localized PR to help capture our target audiences attention quickly and to drive signups to what would be our primary marketing vehicle - our email database. We quickly scaled it to a number large enough to drive considerable traffic to our content post-launch.
Another key area we focused on with our content strategy was to build storytelling around the actual economic reports themselves as well as the four pillars that were outlined within these reports. Here is a selection of videos that focused on those underlying pillars and helped establish the narrative that would flow forward through all future content.
THE FOUR CHALLENGES
We also wanted to make sure we told the story of the man behind these reports – at face value he seemed like an outsider poking his nose into our community. But the reality was he was born and raised here in Wichita and he even credited much of his success to those early formative years. This was our opportunity to ensure that local leaders took his message as more than just the words of a New York city finance guy but as someone from our city who cared deeply about it’s future.
Another area of focus in our content strategy was to create content series that would build off of a theme and would work to incorporate community members within the content - driving engagement through their networks as well as ours and continuing to push our messaging to a larger audience.
POWER BREAKFAST | ELEVATOR PITCHES | ENTREPRENEURSHIP 101 | IN-FOCUS
At the center of this effort was the content-focused site: articles, videos and infographics published multiple times per month. Explore the site.
Produced @ Idea Ranch
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CD / Shawn Harris
Copywriter / Jake Trease
Videographer & Editor / Kelly Johnson, Ben Doerner
Producer / Ashley Spahn, Caroline Harris, Erica Denny