CASE STUDY

Celebrate Quality.
Boost engagement.

The Client

Every November, quality experts and fanatics worldwide celebrate World Quality Month: a time to raise quality awareness, set new goals, and highlight individual and organizational quality achievements from the past year. American Society for Quality (ASQ) provides knowledge, certification, and other tools and resources to quality professionals and members all over the world. They’re also one of the biggest champs of WQM and strive to make it feel special every year.

Concepting

Social Planning & Assets

Digital Promotions

Marketing & Print Collateral

COLORS

The Ask

Thinking outside of the box

This year, the Jacks were tasked with helping ASQ take their World Quality Month digital efforts up a notch. And rise to that challenge, did we ever! Our partner in strategy — ASQ’s Digital Marketing Manager Tim Demeter — wanted more people to participate in a fun and engaging way, so he suggested gamification, which had been popular in past social posts. Think of it like a scavenger hunt plus trivia-style experience that could happen within all digital channels. So we took that idea and ran with it full throttle!

The Answer

A wee bit of an obsession

Sometimes our best ideas come from the commonplace items that casually dot our daily landscape. The “Planner Scanner” concept was born from Jordan’s obsession with her daily planner. The trick, though, was tying together an analog productivity tool to an interactive game everyone could easily play virtually. Put on your thinkin’ caps, Jacks!

So what if we posted clues to ASQ’s social channels, placed hints and red herrings in a downloadable weekly planner, and ran polls on LinkedIn so participants could see if they found the right answer? And get rewarded with fun freebies?

What?
In order to sell this logistically-complex Planner game to the ASQ team, we had to fully bake the entire experience into a proof-of-concept. Because the interactive activities were so intricately woven through all 30 days of November (yes, 30 days!) AND several digital channels, our explanation would fall flat without the proper detailed story design.

“I gave the Jacks my half an idea (that people in my own organization only barely understood) and they got it, ran with it, and made it something far more engaging than I had ever imagined myself. Not only that but the final deliverables made execution on my end an absolute breeze.”

– Tim Demeter
Digital Marketing Manager, ASQ

The experience

Spreadsheets Galore

Member events and conferences, new product launches, website improvements, and annual reports are in constant flux at ASQ, so there are always an array of moving pieces at any given time. We work closely with a variety of team members from various departments throughout the organization in order to stay cohesive and aligned to department and company-wide marketing goals and both brands as a whole. Their team makes our job easier so we can make their jobs easier in turn.

Just a Bug-in-a-bug Bug

We then created the abundance of assets required to make this WQM the best one yet – from a variety of social media graphics and a WQM Celebration Guide, to digital freebies like social banner “bumper stickers,” profile images, wallpaper backgrounds, and participation badges. One of our favorite activities was to “find the bug” ASQ’s website – a cute beetle driving a mini VW-bug-style vehicle (a Bug-in-a-bug Bug). We snuck it on ASQ’s Learning for Organizations landing page, to bring more visibility to the recent redesign by our team. Double-win.

Everyone loves a good trivia

We also wrote all 25 social posts and designed five weeks of detailed Digital Planner pages to help our “Planner Scanner Participants” search for clues to help them solve puzzles, answer trivia questions, read ASQ Member spotlights, and play “Quality Time” games all month long.

The Results

Excited over impressions

By month’s end, both teams couldn’t be more ecstatic about the final results. It was such a blast following the ASQ social channels to watch people participate, comment, and share the clue and activity posts. Some folks even printed and displayed the “Planner Scanner” pages for their teams to check in with each week!

The biggest hit was our “Quality Tools” activity, which asked folks to match their personality with one of the seven Basic Quality Tools, and then share it with teammates and colleagues. On LinkedIn, this post had 15,005 impressions and 14,320 post-clicks! We just loved watching everyone have fun with it!

2022 vs. 2021 Engagement Comparisons for the Win!

The Takeaways

The more the merrier

We also concepted design options that can be used as a marketing or sales opportunity for future iterations. These would feel less like a sales pitch and more like highlighting member benefits. For example, for the January issue of Quality Progress, we reused the planner design to inspire readers to set 2023 Quality Goals, check out the following year’s events, and update membership.

As a team, we also learned how important it is to demonstrate to clients how much fun they can have when it comes to fresh campaign ideas. While the average person wouldn’t necessarily tie together “Quality” and “Fun,” from our experience with ASQ and ASQE over the past year plus, we’ve learned that their audience loves to geek out on this stuff! It’s ok to experiment, to let your hair down, kick up your heels, and push into the weird a little!

Smashing Analytics Records Like No Big Deal

“In the summer of 2022 I mentioned in a meeting that I had a germ of an idea to reimagine our annual World Quality Month. I thought it was going to be a winner but I didn’t have the time to see it through nor the full vision of how it would come together. Enter: Streamline Jacks.

They got it, ran with it, and made it something far more engaging than I had ever imagined myself. As a direct result of the Jacks’ creative energy, we saw engagement triple over previous years, and we smashed analytics records on individual posts. Thank you Jacks for taking an abstract idea and hammering it into a fun and successful campaign!”