Work
America’s Grasslands Coalition unites ten leading conservation organizations behind one goal: making grasslands a national conservation priority. They had under 60 days to launch a refreshed brand, a new website, and a live paid campaign — timed to the one week of the year the whole country might be looking.
America’s grasslands face a real awareness gap. Three-quarters of Americans visit grasslands every year, but only about 16% can even name the ecosystem. People already know the place. They just don’t have a name for it.
Teal came on as strategic marketing lead for the multi-year campaign to close that gap, with a plan grounded in upfront due diligence and a clear read on how to guide the coalition toward an ambitious goal. But one date on the calendar wouldn’t wait for that plan. National Grasslands Week fell in late June, timed to the public release of the coalition’s national survey — the single best moment of the year to put grasslands in front of people. Yet the core campaign wasn’t set to launch until the end of July.
Letting that week pass unused wasn’t an option. Using it meant standing up a full launch in under 60 days: a refreshed brand, new messaging, a website, and a live paid campaign coordinated across ten organizations.
Rather than treat National Grasslands Week as a standalone splash, Teal reframed it as a mini campaign with two jobs. The first was public: Build excitement for the coalition. The second was internal: Run a real, contained campaign that would surface every operational question, from partner audience data to content calendars to ad account setup, before the far larger core campaign inherited them.
That reframe also set the targeting. A one-week budget and timeline can’t effectively move unfamiliar audiences, so Teal aimed the campaign squarely at known and likely supporters of the ten partners — the people most ready to act, and the ones most likely to become organic amplifiers once the core campaign opened up to broader audiences later.
A coalition brand has a specific job: give ten organizations, each with its own identity, audience, and sensitivities, one banner they can all stand behind. Teal refreshed the coalition’s visual identity and messaging into exactly that, distinctive enough to own National Grasslands Week and last well beyond it, and open enough that every partner could put its name beside it.
The system lets natural photography do the persuading: the burrowing owl, the bison, native bees, ranchers on horseback, the open landscape itself, all paired with a message that works the angle the research pointed to — Americans have seen grasslands their whole lives without knowing the name. Sourcing imagery that ten partners could agree on, across distinct views of a nuanced subject and distinct licensing terms, was its own hurdle. The team cleared it on deadline, without diluting the look.
The site had two roles: The landing page for the mini campaign and a central home for the coalition itself. Partway in, client security requirements ruled out the planned WordPress build. Rather than reset the timeline, Teal hard-coded the site, trading the flexibility of a CMS for the certainty of launching on the date.
For a splash tied to a fixed week, that was the right trade. Grasslanders.org went live for National Grasslands Week as the destination every Teal-run ad pointed to, and the hub each coalition partner pointed its own channels toward, across social, web, and email alike.
Within our limited target audience of known and likely supporters, the paid media ran in two tiers. A broad, low-cost layer put grasslands in front of as many of those supporters as possible. A tighter, higher-intent layer of retargeting and search then followed the people who leaned in, at a higher cost but with far stronger engagement.
That two-tier structure is the same strategic mechanism the multi-year core campaign will run at full scale — broad discovery feeding sharp, high-intent follow-up — proven here first in one contained week. The creative leaned into curiosity over explanation, too: a yawning owl, a single arresting survey stat. In a crowded feed, intrigue pulled the most traffic.
I'm impressed by how quickly the Teal team processed the complexity of this coalition and campaign. The brand strategy is wonderful. And when we shared the mini campaign results with senior leadership, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone was excited to see the launch come to life, and especially impressed by the website and the ad creative. We can't wait to apply what we learned to make the full campaign even stronger.
In seven days, the paid campaign reached over a million unique users and gave the new site its first real surge of traffic: 2,737 visits, more than three-quarters of them paid, at an efficient CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of just $3.77 for the broad supporter audience. Paid media accounted for 52% of the site’s engaged sessions, not only its raw clicks.
2,737 site visits
$3.77 cost per thousand impressions
With the support of Teal’s creative and strategic guidance, the coalition’s partners carried it further. During the week, across their owned and earned channels, grasslands drew:
8.36M earned media views
2.3M social engagement
That was the organic amplification the supporter-first strategy was built to spark.
The second win never showed up in a dashboard. The campaign validated the two-tier audience model the core campaign now runs on, and surfaced the operational questions early enough to solve them before the stakes rose. The coalition went into its multi-year campaign having already collaborated on a successful campaign.
The mini campaign was phase one. Teal now leads the core campaign as an always-on paid program with focused testing sprints spanning search, Meta, Reddit, YouTube, podcasts and radio, and programmatic video and display. The audience model proven during Grasslands Week is the one scaling now — broad discovery feeding high-intent follow-up — with the operational kinks already worked out.
America’s Grasslands Coalition is just getting started, and Teal couldn’t be more excited to keep supporting this growing movement.
The best projects are ones where we can really nerd out, and the Grasslands team makes that easy. They care so deeply about the nuances of grasslands conservation and are excited to share their insights, and they always have great questions about the nuances of our strategic expertise and are engaged in hearing our answers. This project has been wonderful because every conversation is imbued with curiosity and discovery on all sides.
A beautiful new website that tells the story of how Global Fund for Children empowers children and youth to reach their full potential.
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