Table of Contents 6 2012 OVATION Awards Winning Entries

Ontario are facing the same crisis and all responses have varied. For Oakville, a call to action and buy‐in
needed to come from various stakeholders if the battle against EAB is to be won. The target audiences
for the EAB campaign include:
Members of Council and Town of Oakville Staff
Community: Town of Oakville residents/Town of Oakville residents with ash trees
Local Business: Oakville Chamber of Commerce, Business Improvement Areas
Ratepayer/resident associations
Forestry/Arborist/Horticulture associations
Media: print/broadcast and Forestry publications
Vendors
Government: municipal, provincial and federal
Goals/Objectives
Goal: The Oakville Canopy Club was launched to raise public awareness of the Town of Oakville’s EAB
Management Plan and to encourage Oakville residents and businesses to take an active role in
protecting our tree canopy. Objective: To seek action by having 200 Oakville residents join Oakville’s
Oakville Canopy Club social media campaign by November 2011.
Goal: To gain public trust by leveraging the town’s reputation as a leader in urban forestry through
targeted media relations. Objective: To increase media coverage by 15 per cent in print, broadcast and
specialized publications by November 2011.
Goal: To educate Oakville residents about Oakville’s online EAB toolkit and available resources.
Objective: To increase number of unique visits to Oakville’s EAB web page by 15 per cent through
targeted marketing/communications and social media efforts by November 2011.
Goal: To use municipal leaders as key spokespeople to build on existing relationships with key
stakeholders/community influencers and to develop NEW partnerships to get residents to take action
and join Oakville’s Canopy Club. Objective: To solicit three new or existing partnerships to help promote
outreach opportunities by November 2011.
Solution Overview
As year one of a three‐year communications plan, our goal was to brand the Oakville Canopy Club
campaign and raise awareness of EAB and treatment options. Educating the public would take time. To
gauge public awareness, we first developed an online survey to understand how educated Oakville
residents and businesses were of EAB. What we found was that over 90 per cent had heard about EAB
and about the same percentage were willing to treat their ash tree. With this data, we understood that
we needed to provide them with the appropriate online tools to engage the public and solicit their help.
Using both traditional and online communications, we launched a well‐branded Oakville Canopy Club
campaign to inspire residents to save Oakville’s tree canopy. We created an interactive website that
reflected the look and feel of the Oakville Canopy Club design. We incorporated five handy buttons to
guide users to helpful and factual online information. Tips to identify an ash trees including an
interactive map that plots the location of ash trees on both public and private property proved to be a
useful resource for residents.
We created a canopyclub@oakville.ca email to allow residents to contact us with their questions and
subsequently, to build an email database (more than 85 residents contacted us from June through
November 2011). We advertised in local papers, maintained a presence at town‐wide special events,