City of New Orleans Dept. of Parks & Parkways
Meta Advertising // Public Sector Marketing // Awareness Campaign Strategy // Community Outreach
The City of New Orleans Department of Parks & Parkways partnered with Von Mack Agency to help amplify awareness of its community tree planting initiative across the New Orleans metro area.
Funded by a grant, the goal was clear: get the message in front of as many relevant local residents as possible while making smart use of the advertising budget.
Rather than developing an entirely new paid creative campaign from scratch, we took a more efficient and community-rooted approach. Von Mack strategically boosted the department’s existing organic social media content, allowing the campaign to maintain an authentic public-sector voice while expanding its reach through Meta advertising.
The result was a high-impact awareness campaign that reached more than half a million people in the New Orleans area and generated over 1.2 million impressions for less than $3,400 in ad spend.
The Challenge
Public awareness campaigns often have to do a lot with a little.
For the City of New Orleans Department of Parks & Parkways, the priority was not flashy advertising or high-production creative. The priority was visibility: making sure residents across key New Orleans-area communities saw and recognized the department’s tree planting message.
The campaign needed to reach a highly localized audience, avoid wasted media spend, and keep the message grounded in the voice residents were already seeing from Parks & Parkways on organic social media.
The Strategy
Von Mack developed a Meta advertising strategy built around reach, efficiency, and local relevance.
The campaign used a reach objective to prioritize broad awareness among New Orleans metro residents. Instead of optimizing for clicks, traffic, or conversions, the campaign focused on getting the tree planting initiative in front of the right people, at the right frequency, within the right geographic area.
Audience targeting was built around specific ZIP codes across New Orleans, Jefferson, and River Ridge, Louisiana. This hyper-local targeting helped concentrate the budget within the communities most relevant to the initiative.
To maximize budget efficiency, Von Mack boosted existing organic posts created by the Parks & Parkways department. This eliminated the need for added production costs while preserving the natural, civic tone of the campaign.
What Worked
The campaign reached 611,409 people in the New Orleans metro area for just $3,381.62 in total ad spend. For a public-sector awareness campaign, that level of reach represents strong community penetration and efficient use of media dollars.
It delivered an average frequency of approximately 2.05, meaning the average person reached saw the content about two times. For an awareness campaign, this is a strong balance: enough repetition to support message recall without creating unnecessary ad fatigue. And by boosting content the department had already created, the campaign avoided extra creative production costs while still generating meaningful engagement. The boosted organic posts produced 1,713 post engagements and 1,730 page engagements, showing that authentic community content can perform well when paired with the right paid media strategy.
- The Right KPI for the Right Goal: This campaign was built for awareness, not website traffic. While link clicks were tracked, they were not the primary measure of success. The strongest indicators of performance were reach, impressions, frequency, and cost per result — and those metrics showed that the campaign did exactly what it was designed to do.
- Hyper-Local Targeting Reduced Waste: ZIP-code targeting helped ensure the campaign budget stayed focused on the communities the initiative was designed to serve. Rather than casting a broad, inefficient net, the campaign concentrated spend in relevant local areas across New Orleans, Jefferson, and River Ridge.
Why It Matters
Local government campaigns are most effective when they meet residents where they already are, speak in a voice that feels familiar, and use public dollars responsibly.
For the City of New Orleans Department of Parks & Parkways, that meant using Meta advertising not as a heavy-handed sales tool, but as a practical way to increase visibility for a community tree planting initiative.
Von Mack helped turn existing organic content into a targeted awareness campaign that reached hundreds of thousands of local residents while keeping the strategy focused, efficient, and true to the department’s voice.
Von Mack develops digital advertising strategies for tourism brands, civic organizations, public agencies, and experience-driven businesses that need to connect with specific audiences in meaningful ways.
From public awareness campaigns to tourism marketing and hyper-local paid media, we help organizations make smart use of their message, their budget, and their platform.
