Almost 90% of households in St. James Town in Toronto have faced food insecurity. The St. James Town Community Cooperative tackles the longstanding issue of food accessibility in this diverse community with its OASIS Community Food Hub that provides healthy, culturally appropriate food to those in need.

The OASIS Community Food Hub is developing an online marketplace to increase access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food, including produce sourced from local eco-farmer partners, for low-income households in the community. Based on the Open Food Network platform, the OASIS Good Food Buying Club has a customer facing online store for members to buy a monthly $50 subscription for healthy food.

The objective of this project is to develop and test a customer acquisition and conversion campaign to obtain new customers for the Good Food Buying Club store.

This is an innovation marketing campaign prototyping project that will involve several different steps for the learners, including:

·      Familiarize themselves with our target market, online store and fresh food subscription services

·      Familiarize themselves with our lead to customer acquisition pipeline and metrics for measuring successful steps

·      Write the requirements of the customer acquisition and conversion campaign to obtain new customers for the Good Food Buying Club store.

·      Design a campaign to target a set of prospects using different channels – a physical channel with poster handouts, a social media channel, a email channel to an online brochure, a WhatsApp Channel

·      Design promotional material for various media, including a paper brochure to hand out, an Instagram post, a WhatsApp post and an online brochure page.

·      Design the call to action for each media to capture customer interest via a QR code, an email address or other means

·      Define the data capture model to document leads, prospects and customers and measure campaign success measures

·      Test each campaign with its promotional material to obtain a set of documented qualified prospects to convert into customers.

·      Using the data generated from each test, modify the marketing materials over a series of sprints to increase the effectiveness of each prospect acquisition approach.

·      Make recommendations to take the most effective approaches to scale

Final deliverables should include:

A tested campaign to find leads and convert them to prospects for the Good Food Buying Club

A, report, Documentation and Recommendations for continuing to take the most effective campaign to scale

Students will connect directly with us for mentorship throughout the project. We will be able to provide answers to questions such as:

Our Fresh Food Subscription Bundle services

Our current understanding of the target market

Input on choices, problems or anything else the students might encounter.

Resources

We can provide students with:

A walkthrough / tutorial of our market, products and services

Results from our initial campaigns.

Wireframes of existing promotional material prototypes