Online Communications

We work closely with Balboa Park Central to promote the Park through online marketing and communications.

Social Media

We have started and maintained two popular blogs for the park, Balboa Park Beat and La Gema de San Diego (a Spanish-language blog). To reach an even broader audience, many articles are cross-posted to SanDiego.com. To further help with outreach to Spanish-speakers, we started a Spanish-language Facebook page, "El Parque Balboa." Our senior editor also assists with the English-language Balboa Park Facebook and Twitter pages.

Google AdWords

As a Google Grants recipient, we manage a Google Adwords account of approximately $10,000 of advertising per month. We also provide training to other Park organizations on how to create and manage AdWords campaigns.

Innovative Online Marketing Campaigns

Museum Marathon

From May 30 to June 25, Maren Dougherty (BPOC senior editor) and Heather Hart (BPOC project manager) spent 26 days living in Balboa Park for a project they dubbed “Museum Marathon.” Without leaving the Balboa Park campus during the campaign, they blogged, Tweeted, and posted Facebook updates about everything they experienced at each of the participating cultural institutions. Through a new partnership with The San Diego Union-Tribune, they also published articles to the new Balboa Park section of the SignOnSanDiego website and to the SanDiego.com site.

The goal of the Marathon was to give greater visibility to the smaller cultural organizations in the Park, as well as the more hidden aspects of the larger ones, such as libraries, volunteer programs, etc.. The project generated more media attention than we anticipated, resulting in media coverage from at least 12 different media outlets in San Diego. This project generated more than 24 interviews and articles by San Diego TV, radio, and newspapers, plus 40 blog posts across 3 sites and more than 2,000 photographs published online.

Top Dog Photo Contest

In August 2010, we launched an online photo contest called "Top Dog" with Balboa Park Central.  People were invited to submit photos of their dogs frolicking in Balboa Park to win prizes from the museums and businesses in and around the park. 

The contest was hugely popular from the day that it launched. Media outlets across San Diego County quickly picked up the story, publishing front-page, feature-length articles about the contest. The contest had more than 175 entries in three weeks. People who submitted entries said that they spent hours with their dogs and kids to find a perfect location in the park.

Participant Comments:
“This was such a fun project…we have walked through the park since we were kids and still find treasures even today! We took so many fun photos it was very hard to select just one.”

“We had fun taking her to the Park and we have some photos that will make us smile when we look at them, and maybe that's worth more than her making your final five.”

Steampunk Design Contest

After launching Giskin Anomaly project in San Diego, BPOC sponsored a Steampunk Design Contest through which members of the public submitted their versions of the game’s anomaly detector. We advertised prizes (e.g., a stay at a local historic hotel) and partnered with local steampunk groups to promote the contest but we had no idea how much time people would dedicate to creating their devices. As the entries began to arrive, we found battery-operated moving parts, light switches, and elaborate metalworking.

First place winner John Hosford spent about 80 hours creating his entry (pictured) titled Sir Tellabeem’s Tempress Mark II. Other submissions were almost as intricate, showing the great time and skill they took to build.

Wearing old-timey vests and goggles, the winners came to Balboa Park to pose with their devices, stopping every so often to explain to Park visitors about the contest and Giskin Anomaly.

“When I first started working on my entry, I didn't know exactly what a temporal anomaly detector looked like. I thought that the closest thing was the PKE meter from 'Ghostbusters,' so I started with that as inspiration, and added on from there,” explained Chris, the 2nd place winner (pictured at left). “The wand idea sounded cool, and since the whole idea of Giskin Anomaly is thought imprints from the past, the earpiece idea sounded perfect.”