IPERrun

IPERrun for Children is an annual fundraising event promoted by C.C. Ipercity to support charitable projects undertaken by Team For Children ONLUS, the recipient of the donation. The first edition of the non-competitive race, covering a distance of 8 km, took place on 25 September 2016. Sponsored by the Municipality of Albignasego, since its first edition the event has attracted a large number of participants, who received a free race pack containing the official event T-shirt. To date, the race has raised funds for important projects such as neonatal screening for sickle cell disease and the construction of the Teen Zone, an area of the Padua hospital dedicated to adolescent patients in the Paediatric Haematology and Oncology Department.

The use of different techniques and equipment allows us to cover the event and produce video content that can be adapted to various types of distribution, such as institutional videos, social media clips, etc.

This event offers numerous advantages for the shopping centre in a variety of areas: from generating positive feedback from citizens and institutions, ensuring visibility linked to charity and promoting the local area in which the centre is located, to creating a repeatable and scalable format and building a database of profiled users that can be exploited over time.

In addition to designing and organising the corporate event, SAY’s task was to create a strong coordinated image to positively characterise the event and apply it to all the supporting materials for the event, from the race pack gadgets to the furnishings set up for the start and finish lines. SAY was responsible for designing and creating the visuals for IPERrun for Children, which were subsequently used during the launch press conference and across all communication channels for the race.

Each edition of the event is promoted with posters ranging from the classic 6×3 street format to public transport shelters, for prolonged exposure throughout the city and province of Padua. This visual approach also helps drive additional traffic to the event website, which is useful for collecting pre-registrations for the race.

The IPERrun for Children website is a very important tool both for promoting the initiative and for operational purposes: in addition to providing all the information about the funded project (the race, the route and how to register), the site collects all online registrations, records PayPal transfers and assigns each runner a race pack with the desired size of shirt. The publication of updated information on the current edition on the website coincides with the press conference presenting the event.

In order to exploit and amplify the emotional wave generated by a charity initiative, the management of the Facebook page plays a key role: not only is content published to encourage registrations on the website, but additional information is also disseminated to increase interest in IPERrun for Children as much as possible, including through content sponsorship and the use of the ‘Event’ format.

The work of the press office is critical in creating a positive and supportive environment for IPERrun for Children that goes beyond the support of individual participants to involve the public and relevant stakeholders. For this reason, the press conference is of interest to all local press, print and TV media, as well as institutional figures and those in the world of research. Subsequent monitoring of published articles and interviews allows us to measure the success and effectiveness of the work carried out.

Using the same internally developed management system for on-site registrations on race day allows us to collect and monitor a large amount of data, enabling us to create a rich database on the one hand, and on the other to speed up and simplify very delicate operations such as managing cash flow from registrations and managing names for insurance purposes.

At the end of the day, it is the numbers that testify to the success of the initiative.