Sharing the Gift of a Smile Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics

At the end of 2016, the team of doctors at Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics launched the very first Central Indiana Smile for a Lifetime Chapter, offering free braces and Invisalign to patients in need across Central Indiana. They engaged us to develop a plan that would generate awareness in the surrounding communities and produce sufficient application submissions during its scholarship selection process every four months.

Because of the constraints of a very limited budget, we elected to promote the program to Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics’ existing client base through website content, blogs, social media posts, and email marketing.

As a result of the blogs and emails, Gorman & Bunch was able to garner a few applications and eventually select its first two scholarship recipients. We captured images of the first recipient — Samantha Sager — at the moment she first found out she’d been selected.

A few months later, we decided to pitch Samantha’s story to the local media, documenting the challenges Samantha faced growing up, the ways in which she gives back to the community and the opportunities a new smile would give her in life. We also captured b-roll footage to accompany the pitch.

A few weeks after the pitch, FOX-59 expressed a desire in creating a feature story on Samantha and asked that we arrange an interview with her, as well as a couple doctors from Gorman & Bunch. At this point, Samantha had begun her freshman year at Purdue University. We worked with the school’s media relations team to coordinate on-campus filming with Samantha, and also arranged sit-down interviews with the doctors. Over the course of the following weeks, we rounded up any additional materials needed by Fox-59 to cut the final story. Two weeks later, the following feature ran on both Fox-59 and CBS 4.

In the days and weeks to follow, the Smile for a Lifetime webpage on the Gorman & Bunch website experienced the following results:

Perhaps more importantly, the story resulted in 15 NEW SMILE FOR A LIFETIME APPLICATIONS and the eventual selection of 6 NEW SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENTS — now receiving free orthodontic care by the team at Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics.