Introduction
The Kilgore House & Garden Tour is the primary fundraiser for the Kilgore Samaritan Counseling Center in Louisville. The Tour is held every May and features six private homes and gardens.
Project Scope
In 2012, the Kilgore House & Garden Tour committee elected to step up its game in terms of promotion. L.B. Schmidt & Associates, LLC stepped forward to provide assistance on a pro-bono basis. The cornerstone of the project included the development of the Tour’s first-ever promotional web site. The web site provided background information on the Tour, a page dedicated to each home and garden on the Tour, along with an all-new online ticket sales option (linked with Pay-Pal).
Luke Schmidt also led efforts to significantly expand the Tour’s media outreach beyond Louisville. New press packets were developed and new press releases were issued. In addition to working with local media outlets (which included live television broadcasts on three of the four Louisville stations), media outreach for the first time also extended up and down the Ohio Valley with scheduled meetings with news and feature editors. Articles on the event were published in the following publications:
- The (Elizabethtown) News-Enterprise
- Evansville Courier Press
- Henderson Gleaner
- Lexington Herald-Leader
- Louisville Courier-Journal
- Nfocus Magazine
- Sophisticated Living
Additional listings on the event were published in the following publications:
- The (Bowling Green) Daily News
- The Cincinnati Enquirer
- The Kentucky Enquirer
- Kentucky Monthly
- The (Nashville) Tennessean
This effort resulted in a total of 12 articles/listings which reached a potential audience of 847,554 people.
Finally, in addition to the regional media outreach and the new web site, Luke Schmidt also facilitated the development of a new Facebook page for the Tour, which in its first year “liked” 81 regional news publications with potential reach to over 2.3 million people.
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