Case Studies
Case Study 1
Redefining Business Education
UBC Sauder School of Business
The UBC Sauder School of Business is recognized as one of the leading business schools in Canada. But when UBC Sauder decided to challenge the traditional view of business education, it enlisted our services to help amplify their vision of the potential for business to contribute to positive social change.
Groundswell developed and executed a detailed communications plan designed to highlight how UBC Sauder’s students, alumni, researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs are making a difference in the world. Refined key messages reinforced UBC Sauder’s emerging position as a leader in the area of responsible business. Ongoing media and communications efforts strengthened the School’s identity and narrative and effectively illustrated how UBC is taking an innovative approach to developing the next generation of business leaders.
Consistency in messaging across all channels has been key to building a strong reputation for UBC Sauder’s unique take on leadership. The messaging we crafted informed speaking engagements, media interviews, student recruitment campaigns and communications to potential donors. Targeted media pitching resulted in interview opportunities for Dean Robert Helsley and positioned UBC Sauder to launch a historic fundraising campaign based on its vision for responsible leadership.
Case Study 2
Advocating for Healthcare Worker Safety
National Alliance for Safety and Health in Healthcare
Today, as we need the caregivers looking after our seniors more than ever, they are burning out, experiencing violence and being injured on the job at unsustainable levels. These high rates of preventable workplace injuries are costing the Canadian health system millions, lowering the quality of care for seniors and contributing to a critical caregiver shortage. The National Alliance for Safety and Health in Healthcare — comprised of provincial senior care safety associations — is working to change that. Together, we developed a national, bilingual campaign to raise awareness and call for action.
As ghostwriters, Groundswell helped craft a series of op-eds, strategically tailored and pitched to media from B.C. to the Maritimes to coincide with provincial and federal budget releases. These earned media pieces called for a coordinated national health HR strategy to focus increased government spending on seniors’ care where it can have the biggest impact.
Groundswell worked with the eight member organizations to develop a website that tells the story of the impact of workplace violence and injuries and the growing caregiver shortage on the nurses, care aides and other care provides they collectively represent.
Together, this integrated communications strategy provided a unified call for a coordinated national strategy to address critical seniors’ care staffing challenges to better protect health care workers, improve the quality of elder care and help offset rising healthcare costs.
Case Study 3
Continuing the Millennium SkyTrain Line to UBC
The University of British Columbia Rapid Transit
The University of British Columbia is a city unto itself. With a daytime population of about 80,000 people, the campus is one of the region’s busiest transit destinations. Four of the five busiest bus lines in the Vancouver area move people to and from UBC. The packed 99 B-Line bus on Broadway is North America’s busiest bus route, carrying more than 17-million passengers a year. This massive volume of UBC-bound traffic is clogging things up, causing long, slow commutes for people who use the Broadway and adjacent corridors and lower productivity for businesses in the area.
Work to connect UBC with the rest of Metro Vancouver by SkyTrain has begun. The Broadway Subway project — extending the Millennium Line SkyTrain to Arbutus Street — is an important start and is now under construction, but the majority of the line’s passengers, headed to and from the campus, will still have to ride a bus to get to where they’re going.
To help raise awareness of extending SkyTrain service to UBC as a regional priority, UBC hired Groundswell to develop a story campaign highlighting the benefits of connecting UBC with rapid transit to downtown, the airport and the far-flung suburbs.
We developed stories showing how connecting UBC to the rest of the region can make people’s lives better that were shared through ads, social media posts and as part of UBC’s “Forward UBC” campaign. We interviewed real UBC students who accessed on-the-job training around Metro Vancouver, ensuring communities have the engineers, early childhood educators, and doctors they need. And we talked to researchers who work with industry in Surrey to develop life-changing UBC discoveries, like the one that led to a key component of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Told from multiple voices, including the President of UBC, these stories helped highlight the human side of a rapid transit project with the potential to transform Metro Vancouver.
Case Study 4
Addressing the Housing Crisis in a Small B.C. Community
The District of Central Saanich
The District of Central Saanich is a quickly growing community that will need new housing options for future generations. To address this need, the District started a community conversation about infill housing in existing neighbourhoods and densification of village centres to inform a new housing policy.
The community strongly supports introducing more affordable, liveable and sustainable housing options like small lots, carriage houses and duplexes as well as higher density housing like townhouses, apartments and mixed-use buildings to help meet evolving housing needs.
Groundswell worked with the planning team to develop a communications plan to support sharing proposed building regulations that addressed community concerns about integrating these new housing options into the community. We developed key messages, web content, flyers and open house materials that helped residents and stakeholders understand how the changes would practically impact their property, how the character of Central Saanich is being preserved and how they could provide input into the new policy.
Together, we identified target audiences and a plan for getting the messaging out to build awareness and understanding of the housing policy changes and opportunities for community input.
Case Study 5
Collaborating with Youth to Address the Climate Emergency
The University of British Columbia
The climate emergency is the defining crisis of our time, and universities have a unique role to play in developing solutions to the collective challenge. In recent years, a wave of student climate activism on campuses around the world has university leaders grappling with how to respond.
At UBC, ongoing pressure from student climate activists prompted the university to declare a global climate emergency and commit to full divestment of investments from the fossil fuel industry.
UBC used the challenge as an opportunity to encourage other universities to join forces with their students to find new solutions. As part of this effort, the university hired Groundswell to help craft an op-ed co-authored by President Santa Ono and a student climate activist urging institutions of higher education to empower students to drive crucial change locally and globally.
We also pitched media that reach post-secondary leaders and strategically linked the article to timely and relevant news topics. The published piece highlighted the most important common ground between higher education leadership and student climate activists: the shared responsibility to give students agency in and hope for creating a better future.
