YMCA Summer Campaigns

Through our partnership with the YMCA of Memphis and the Mid-South, we've created campaigns to kick off the summer season for the past several years! The YMCA launches campaigns annually for membership, recruitment, and fundraising, but this presented a new opportunity to design more outward-facing campaigns within the YMCA brand.

Summer at the Y

Inspired by summer festival line-ups, the Summer at the Y was a branded weekly event calendar with games, food trucks, pool activities, and movie nights. The goal was to create a campaign that made Y members excited about using their membership and encouraged them to visit other Y locations throughout the city.

The poster design was the center of the Summer at the Y campaign with a retro color palette and custom icon designs.

One of the challenges within this campaign was how to best organize a rotating calendar of events that could be easily updated and shared, whether on the YMCA website or social media. The design used a grid of information for each day that could be revised on the fly if the scheduled changed. We also created further social media templates for the Y team to share for specific events like food truck schedules and movie showings.

The t-shirt design and social media posts supported the campaign for its duration, as well as custom photography at a YMCA pool to feature families and kids having fun.

YMCA Summer Camp 2024: Rock the Summer

Each year the YMCA Summer Camp introduces a new theme to inspire the campers on their summer activities and create a fun learning environment. In 2024, Campers could "Rock the Summer" with fun music-themed activities, and the campaign included a custom logo with guitar, amp, microphone, and other rocking elements.

The 2024 campaign included a heavy focus on digital advertising, as well as support from traditional billboards, radio, print, and partnership with local influencers. Paradigm's digital team was able to generate specific targeted ads based on registration data from previous years and cover a wide area from Oxford and Olive Branch to Memphis and West Tennessee.

Custom Photography

YMCA Summer Camp 2023: Summer Wonderland

For 2023's theme of "Summer Wonderland," we created a custom logo to lead the campaign inspired by a carnival, with fun elements of fireworks, tickets, and pennant banners.

The 2023 camp campaign included 11 additional activity icons to align with each week's camp theme and a prominent t-shirt design for each camper and leader to wear. As this campaign had a large digital advertising component, we also created a suite of display and social media designs, plus email marketing, website content, and digital billboards.