Branding • Brand Messaging • Email Marketing • Social Marketing
The Dublin Food Pantry: A Case Study
At MJ2 Marketing, we thrive on collaborating with our clients to find their unique niche on social and digital platforms. We then work with each client to identify their specific goals for their digital marketing efforts, develop an integrated strategy, and most importantly, execute the plan with our team of blended resources.
About the Dublin Food Pantry
For over 46 years, the Dublin Food Pantry has been providing food, hygiene products, and resources to individuals and families within the Dublin community who are experiencing food insecurity. When the Dublin Food Pantry originally opened, there was only one high school and Dublin was a village. As of 2022, Dublin City Schools is the 9th largest school district in Ohio and the population of the City of Dublin exceeds 50,000. As a result, the pantry now services an area that spans parts of three counties and eight ZIP codes.
Support for the pantry has been widespread since its inception, but as Dublin and the school district grew over the years, the pantry has had to adjust. But the Pantry has never before been challenged the way it was by the global COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting increase in need within the Dublin community. From serving a monthly average of 769 individuals in 2019, the pantry served an average of 1,052 people in 2020 and 1,763 in 2021. In early 2023, more than 2,000 individuals are being served monthly.
Meeting the Needs of the Dublin Community
In order to meet the growing needs of the Dublin community, the Dublin Food Pantry launched a $3 million comprehensive capital campaign to purchase and renovate a larger, more accessible facility at 6608 Dublin Center Drive. The new facility will allow the Pantry to expand outreach services, partner with other local nonprofit organizations to have resources in-house to meet needs beyond food insecurity, grow fresh produce in-house through a community garden, and allow the choice pantry to greatly expand.MJ2 Marketing, along with Cramer & Associates, were tapped to help create and launch the capital campaign in 2022. During the initial phase of the project, the MJ2 team developed the campaign theme, Everyone Eats Here, along with the creative feel, overarching message, and voice of the campaign. All of those pieces were used to create a campaign landing page and, later, a full website, marketing collateral, and brand assets to help launch the campaign.
Amplifying the Message
Once the campaign was launched, MJ2 Marketing immediately executed what we do best…brand awareness. With its new, high-performance website, the Dublin Food Pantry effectively told its story, inviting everyone to #ComeToTheTable to address food insecurity.
Our multi-pronged strategy consisted of:
- Continued strategic adjustments throughout the various phases of the campaign.
- Email marketing that utilizes warm and cold lists to elicit community support for the campaign.
- Ongoing creative support to keep the message fresh and appealing.
- Curation of blog posts to share updates about the campaign, provide education on the topic of food insecurity, and tell the story of the Dublin Food Pantry.
- Social media marketing to amplify the messaging of the Dublin Food Pantry and the capital campaign.
Video support to further tell the story of why the Dublin Food Pantry is essential to the overall well-being of the Dublin community.
Measuring Success
The Dublin Food Pantry’s website has seen an increase in web traffic, where more than half the traffic comes from organic searches. More than two pages are visited per session, and the average duration of each session is 1:29. We call that sticky content.
MJ2 designed and developed an email strategy focusing on list growth, and a campaign ask for each Dublin family to donate $100 towards the capital campaign.
The open rates for emails are high above industry standards. Using DFP’s primary email list, we were able to receive a 52% open rate! But even more importantly, MJ2 Marketing tested their email strategy to a cold list of 4,582 emails and received an overwhelming 42% open rate. To date, The Dublin Food Pantry has received donations of over $70,000 from 3405 subscribers and has grown its database to over 7,000 subscribers.
The Dublin Food Pantry has raised nearly $2M towards its total goal of $3M, which has allowed them to purchase the new space, begin renovation, and plan for a Fall 2023 opening.