Client: Books For Soldiers
Services: Strategy, branding, Corporate Idenity, Viral, PR, Marketing, Marketing Collateral, Web Design

Company Overview:
Books For Soldiers is a soldier support charity that started during the first Gulf War. Volunteers gathered a thousand books and sent them to US Army contacts in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to distribute them to soldiers in Army hospitals. At the beginning of the Iraq war, BFS wanted to support soldiers again, but knew they needed a different strategy to reach more soldiers with less resources used by the charity. BFS wanted to also expand their range and support any soldier deployed outside of the United States.

Problems
• Extremely limited financial and human resources
• A non-cooperative Defense Department
• Potential for abuse

Implications
• Slow distribution of relief supplies
• Ineffectual communication with troops
• Perception of taking advantage of troops

Solutions
The Carepackages For The Mind Campaign
I directed the Carepackages For The Mind campaign and ancillary services - a full service package of strategy, branding, corporate identity, viral, PR, marketing, collateral, and web design.

Strategy
A good strategic approach and roadmap for BFS was foundational to all other endeavors. The old methodology of operation was clearly not going to achieve their goals. My approach was to move the purchasing, collection and shipment of books out from the organization and onto a large group of volunteers. The plan was for BFS to collect and post the soldier's request on their website and let the public fill the requests. BFS becomes a self-service support website.

Branding and Identity
I designed a simple and highly graphic logo in muted desert tones to symbolize the current environment soldiers now find themselves. "Carepackages of the Mind" became a very memorable tag line that explained exactly what the charity was.

Web Design and Deployment
The website became the conduit between the soldiers and an American public aching to make a difference. Because of budgetary restraints, I deployed a simple front end to the website and used open source software to run the posting and fulfillment area. This clever use of a forum allowed BFS to use the money saved for other campaign needs.

Viral Marketing
During the opening salvos of the Iraq War, with the PR and marketing components in place, visitors found their way to the site easily. Traffic soared and the servers could barely keep up with the hits. However, within four hours of the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down by the US Army, visitors to the site dropped 90% whereas soldier requests continued to increase. I developed a viral campaign to bring visitors back to the site. By getting the active site volunteers to place announcements in their weekly church bulletin, new visitors began to rise once again. Ancillary viral marketing to librarians, used bookstores, online book clubs (like Bookcrossing) and scout troops pumped new traffic to the site, resulting in new volunteers.

Public Relations
PR for BFS has been a delicate balancing act. Due to the intense political nature of the war, keeping the focus on the troops and keeping the volunteers from devolving into political squabbling required a well planned PR campaign and site policy. The success of the PR campaign allowed BFS to partner with Michael Moore, co-brand with Fahrenheit 9-11 and survive. This co-branding increased the pool of volunteers from 1,000 to 13,000.

Advertising and Marketing
The advertising campaign frequency and placement was dependent on the ratio between solider requests and volunteer fulfillment. A careful balance of these is required or things would fall apart. Too few soldier requests results in hundreds of packages sent to an individual and the volunteer traffic begins to fall due to a lack of new requests. Too many soldier requests and requests would go unfilled because their would not be enough volunteers to fill the requests. To keep this balance during the site's non-linear growth, banner ads were used on soldier specific websites and solider support organizations if soldier requests began to slow. To increase volunteers, ads were placed in political blogs whose readership tended to be civilian but supportive of the troops.

One of the early qualities of BFS that I identified was that it brought people together; for volunteers to talk about "their" soldiers and to discuss the war. To aid in this, BFS partnered with MeetUp.com, a popular social tool for people of like mind to gather. It is the same online tool that has been used for political campaigns.

Collateral
I directed several pieces of collateral for people to use the BFS branding in their book drive, packing party, Meet Up, company soldier picnic or scout troop project. T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, POS, posters and press kits all available online.