Home Sweet Home for West Dallas Veteran

Corporate sponsors continue to enlist their support for Rebuilding Together Greater Dallas’ home rebuild projects providing volunteers, financial donations and supplies.

The Story

Rebuilding Together Greater Dallas, a local chapter of the national rebuild organization, teamed with Home Depot and other sponsors for its annual Veteran’s Rebuild project. Each year Rebuilding Together selects one deserving U.S. veteran and spends months repairing their home – from flooring and insulation to foundation repair, painting and landscaping. The 2012 recipient is ex-marine Carmen Toston, a single mother of four young children. Repairs on Ms. Toston’s home in West Dallas wrapped on Veterans Day, right up until a key-giving ceremony with the Rebuilding Together team, corporate sponsors, volunteers and the Toston family.

How We Told the Story

We invited the Dallas-Fort Worth broadcast and print media to attend select volunteer work days and the key-giving ceremony on Veterans Day. Visual media through pictures and videos were our most successful form of storytelling. Local affiliate news stations like CBS (news story) filmed spotlights of the home repairs with volunteers, interviews with Ms. Toston and Rebuilding staff.  Photographer Jennifer Crenshaw documented the rebuild work over 60 days (album online) and gave us great content for social media and to support online news (ex: Blue Ribbon News). We coordinated our media outreach with the event sponsors including Home Depot and Dickey’s Barbecue, who distributed press releases and social media posts about their company involvement.

The Result

A once little-known local organization, Rebuilding Together Greater Dallas is continuing to gain awareness and respect in the Dallas-Fort Worth community. To tell this story well through the media, we were able to capitalize on three strong ‘hooks’: 1) Attention to development and revitalization in West Dallas, 2) the timeliness of Veterans Day, and 3) collaboration with established brands who sponsored the rebuild. The organization’s list of corporate sponsors continues to grow with each rebuild project, further enabling the team meet the needs of local families who deserve safe, quality homes.  A video interview with Executive Director Maggie Brodnax sums up the success of the campaign: