Recruitment Campaign
Toronto Police AssociationSummary
The Toronto Police Service (TPS) is the police service for Toronto. The TPS has approximately 7,600 full-time and part-time uniform and civilian members, including front-line police officers, criminal investigators, community response officers, parking enforcement officers, communications operators, court officers, civilian specialists and support staff.
Blue Door was engaged to develop and implement a sophisticated digital advertising campaign designed for recruitment. As TPS and TPA faced challenges with recruitment, Blue Door created a campaign to highlight the benefits of a career in policing focused on generating a new pool of qualified candidates to protect and serve.
The Goal
- Increase overall applicants to the Toronto Police Service
- Increase overall qualified applicants to the Toronto Police Service
- Generate awareness of the recruitment campaign, and the joint effort by TPS/TPA
- Improve the diversity of applicants across all positions at the TPS
- Reignite a sense of pride in joining the service and serving as a member of the service
The Approach
Our comprehensive digital advertising strategy utilized programmatic display placements and leveraged automated intelligence (AI) to find the right audience at the right time on the right platform. To ensure the campaign was highly representative of the communities the TPS serves, our advertisements featured real police officers with diverse backgrounds and ages, and spanned from new hires to seasoned officers. We leveraged graphic design to ensure the ads were captivating and used motion graphics and other optimizations consistently.
Our multi-channel campaign included digital advertising, out-of-home advertising and organic social media integration.
Results
The recruitment campaign, which was the first partnership between Toronto Police Service and Toronto Police Association, exceeded all qualitative and quantitative goals, including increasing draft applications by 63%, completed applications by 15%, and increasing qualified leads (passing L1 and L2 screenings) by 29%. From a brand awareness perspective, the recruitment campaign generated 42.6 million impressions.
To confirm that our ads led to new candidates joining the service, our team developed a Typeform and surveyed 100 cadets inside the training course who we believed came from our campaign directly.
Blue Door is proud to have implemented the first joint venture between the Toronto Police Association (TPA) and the Toronto Police Service (TPS) with results that exceeded all expectations. We now work with police and fire services across the country on a similar recruitment mandate.
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