We are a group of creative people who help organizations make their ideas beautiful.
Enterprise Holdings
Content Playbook + Philanthropic Campaign
At Enterprise Holdings, a great deal of care goes into ensuring every vehicle, from their rental cars to commercial trucks to fleet vehicles, is in exceptional operating condition before it comes in contact with a customer. Enterprise would never, for instance, find themselves in the position of trying to tighten lug nuts, top up tire pressure, or clean windshields while a customer is driving off the lot. But in Paradowski’s line of work, sometimes you need to build the thing while you’re driving it.
“The thing,” in this case, was a robust content strategy for Enterprise Holdings’ corporate communications and recruitment channels. A Paradowski client since early 2020—right before the pandemic changed, well, everything—Enterprise kicked its focus on employee and recruitment content into high gear in 2021, asking us to develop bold new ways to connect, refresh top-performing series, and define new frontiers where the company could engage more meaningfully with employees and secure its status as a thought leader in mobility among external audiences. As we began to define a framework for future content development, we needed to develop content for immediate use at the same time.
In short? Enterprise Holdings needed a pit crew.
A good content strategy is sturdy at its core, but ever-evolving in its activation. It’s influenced by external and environmental factors that can change user behavior and require new best practices. But this was motion on another scale. As the strategic arm of Paradowski set about defining creative territories and key audience drivers to guide development beyond 2022, the creative team was rolling out road-ready content that aligned with those findings on a monthly basis. As was the case, for instance, with the work we developed for Fill Your Tank.
Operating more than 6,000 branch locations throughout North America and Europe gives Enterprise Holdings unique insight into thousands of communities and what makes them special. As a business neighbor to all of these communities, Enterprise recognizes something they all have in common: food insecurity. Through the Enterprise Holdings Foundation, specifically the Fill Your Tank initiative, the company will donate $115 million to fight hunger over a ten-year period.
Enterprise saw an opportunity to expand involvement in the cause,
as well as its reputation as a global philanthropic leader. Leading up to the 2021 giving season, Paradowski suggested that Enterprise use their platform to talk about the company’s fight against food insecurity and inspire giving among current and prospective employees.
A social campaign about food insecurity among your fellow man—in the holiday season, no less—is a difficult needle to thread.
How do you explain that a lack of mobility is at the center of what defines a food desert without appearing to center your own mobility-related company? How do you communicate that Enterprise employees have helped food banks pack more than 333,700 pounds of food since 2017 without minimizing the need for even more support?
It was important that this sensitive topic didn’t become trivialized, even as we utilized colorful animations within the company’s employer brand palette. By keeping the videos short and eye-catching, we were able to fit thoughtful nuance into ~40-second clips and increase the chance that harried holiday season social users would actually stop and watch.
The key, of course, was education. In our research, we quickly realized that donation numbers on a spreadsheet only tell a fraction of the story. What if we could use Enterprise’s sizable platform to educate about this complex and widely misunderstood issue? Nodding at the language of Fill Your Tank, Paradowski concepted and created Gauge Your Knowledge—a video series and interactive quiz filter that touches on the subtleties of food insecurity with short animations.
Each week, a new video dropped on Enterprise’s internal employee communications platform as well as recruitment social channels including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
In addition, Paradowski developed a custom interactive Instagram filter where users could literally “gauge their knowledge” with a simple head tilt, answering multiple-choice quiz questions pertaining to what they learned from the videos.
The effect? Both current and prospective employees learned more about what Enterprise was doing to fight food insecurity, while also discovering what that fight entails. Users walked away with a more nuanced understanding of the issue and the communities it affects, and came away feeling aligned with Enterprise’s efforts and values. And, perhaps, motivated to join the effort during this season of giving.
We road-tested our insights, and we’re keeping our findings handy.
The insights that informed Gauge Your Knowledge were developed in parallel to the work needed to craft our content playbook. Now that we’re equipped with a fine-tuned and actionable strategic foundation, we can continue creating content that fires on all cylinders of Enterprise's corporate goals. But we’re not hanging up our pit crew jackets. After all, good content creators are always moving to meet the moment.