jen
caltrider
HELLO I'M JEN
I LOVE TELLING STORIES
ABOUT
PORTFOLIO
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GOT INSURANCE? CAMPAIGN
In 2013, I teamed up with the health policy organization Colorado Consumer Health Initiative on a campaign aimed at educating young people about the soon-to-launch Obamacare health insurance exchanges. Raising awareness of these new markets was the goal. We created the Got Insurance? campaign with our small budget of about $15,000. Within an hour of launch, our campaign was featured on the front-page of Buzzfeed. Soon, our website had one million hits and we were covered on every major news outlet from the Today Show to the Daily Show to the New York Times. Our Brosurance ad became an icon of the campaign and even spurred an Urban Dictionary entry. We continued our campaign with another round of ads, this time targeting women, and soon reached 25 million hits on our website and recorded nearly $1 million dollars worth of earned media from our small campaign. Advertising experts called our small campaign one of the best created for marketing Obamacare's health insurance exchanges. PR Daily awarded it the prize for Best Cause Advocacy in 2014. Whether you loved the campaign or hated it, it was recognized as one of the best at accomplishing the goal of raising awareness of Obamacare's health insurance exchanges among young people.
CREATIVE MESSAGING BACKGROUND
THANKS OBAMACARE CAMPAIGN
In 2011, a year and a half after the Affordable Care Act became law, Obamacare, as it had become most well known, was quite unpopular. That's when a Colorado-based health policy organization-Colorado Consumer Health Initiative-was given a small grant to educate the public about the merits of the law. CCHI contacted me and asked to partner on this work. They would do the policy side of things, I would do the messaging and campaign development side of things. Together, we created the Thanks Obamacare campaign at a time when Obamacare was considered a bad name for the law. Our goal: reclaim the word Obamacare and turn it into a positive. Our plan: target influentials, including elected officials and celebrities, as well as people who worked in the health care field and get them to thank Obamacare. With online backing from everyone from MC Hammer to Martin O'Malley, we soon drummed up support from voices all across the country as well as ongoing positive press coverage from everyone from the Washington Post to the United Healthcare newsletter, we succeeded. On March 23, 2012, the second anniversary of Obamacare being signed into law, President Obama sent a campaign email saying "I Like Obamacare." This was the first time they had used the term in their communications. When one of our organization's board members spoke to Jim Messina, President Obama's campaign manager, about this, he directly attributed our successful #ThanksObamacare campaign for their move to adopt usage of the term.
#JEFFCOSCHOOLBOARDHISTORY TRENDING
In 2014, the conservative takeover of Colorado's second largest school district's school board drew the ire of local citizens and considerable media attention after a string of unpopular decisions, including one that would have conservatively censored the AP history curriculum. Student-led protests drew local attention to the matter. A colleague of mine suggested we have some fun on Twitter and try to draw national attention to the issue. We teamed up and started the hashtag #JeffCOSchoolBoardHistory, a hashtag made to poke fun at the questionable decision the school board was making about the history curriculum. Within an hour, we had the hashtag trending in Denver. After stories by local and national press, including the Washington Post, Buzzfeed, and the Denver Post, we spent the next 24 hours trending nationally. Over 12,000 tweets were tweeted into the hashtag in a 48-hour period. This national attention reflected negatively on the school board and they subsequently decided not to make the curriculum changes. The following year, three of the conservative members of the school board were ousted in a recall election.
ABOUT ME
Born and raised in rural West Virginia, I grew up on good, old-fashioned storytelling. It's in my blood to this day. I also have a passion for leaving the world a better place than I found it. Put this together with a creative brain that craves innovation and loves to laugh and insert it into the digital age and you have a person who loves waking up every day to tell the stories that inspire people to action.
WHAT I'VE DONE
I began my career as a journalist at CNN. From there I moved into digital media. I am recognized as a pioneer in the use of digital media strategies, messaging, and communications. I design and create digital campaigns that reach millions online and off. My video productions have won multiple awards. My Got Insurance campaign, a collaborative effort with a Colorado-based health policy group, gained nearly a $1 million dollars in earned media on a $15,000 budget.
I have over a decade of experience in social media strategy and campaign design, video and audio production, and graphic design. My creative skill set includes messaging and brand development, digital advertising strategies, and production of viral content. I've led teams on large scale projects and worked as a nationally recognized trainer.