The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA)

ELISE has collaborated with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) on its annual March Madness for the Mind event—an annual exhibition of collegiate innovation—since 2006. We now provide comprehensive communications services for the NCIIA, including branding strategy, key message development, traditional and social media strategy and partnership facilitation.

APPROACH

ELISE introduced the NCIIA to Inventors Digest (ID), the country’s leading publication for the invention culture, as a prospective marketing partner for the 2010 March Madness for the Mind. The NCIIA teamed with the magazine on a video competition to help drive advance interest about the annual event. Specifically, ID hosted a video competition for all March Madness for the Mind-participating teams on inventorsdigest.com; shared the information broadly across social networking sites including Twitter and Facebook; and dedicated the March “Energy” issue of Inventors Digest to profiling NCIIA teams working on alternate energy solutions.

ELISE created a media toolkit to announce the partnership—including a social media release complete with photos, suggested tweets and factoids about the event—as well as social media partner guidelines.

RESULTS

Proof that good web content goes viral, the March Madness for the Mind video competition earned over 4,000 votes in just three weeks, increasing the unique traffic on inventorsdigest.com by over 100 percent. A strong partnership has also emerged from the NCIIA and Inventors Digest’s shared interests. The video competition and social media release increased brand familiarity and advance media engagement, making the event more attractive to a broader audience. Our social media campaign helped to earn over 124,000,000 media impressions, including placement on the GOOD blog, NextBillion.net, SF Appeal, Treehugger and Voice of America, and has helped to spur attention for young entrepreneurs hoping to someday bring their ideas to market. The collaboration between Inventors Digest and the NCIIA also won a 2010 Integrated Marketing Award (IMA) in the Print/Video category, beating out the collaboration between MONEY Magazine and Kia Motors.

ELISE will continue to work with NCIIA for the 2011 March Madness for the Mind event, which has been renamed “Open Minds” in keeping with branding of the NCIIA’s annual meeting, Open.