City of Eugene Recreation
Outdoor Recreation for Women
Building confidence and community through women-led outdoor experiences.
View campaign video
The overview
A multi-format campaign for women-led outdoor classes — mountain biking, sailing, rock climbing — that lowered the intimidation of traditionally male-dominated spaces and pushed programs from half-full to three-quarters full.
The film
The episode
Strategy
A storytelling campaign highlighting women-specific outdoor recreation classes — mountain biking, sailing, and rock climbing — designed to increase participation by showing safe, supportive entry points into spaces that often feel intimidating.
Audience
- Primary: women and female-identifying community members interested in trying outdoor recreation, from beginner to intermediate.
- Secondary: supporters of inclusive recreation, instructors and partners, and decision-makers invested in access and belonging.
Goals
- Raise awareness of women-specific outdoor offerings.
- Reduce barriers to participation — confidence, perceived skill level, intimidation.
- Position Recreation programming as welcoming, skill-building, and community-driven.
- Create evergreen promotional assets for seasonal reuse.
Touchpoints
The story was structured around belonging, skill-building, and the participant experience, filmed across three activities and varied locations. Capture paired brief instructor interviews with real beginners in action, plus environmental shots that grounded each activity and details that signalled safety and instruction.
Rollout
One production yielded a full set of assets, distributed across channels and timed to summer registration windows — all entirely organic, with instructor and partner resharing.
The formats
- Short film with instructor voice and b-roll
- Podcast episode cut from the interviews
- Photography set
- Blog post
- Social reel
The platforms
- YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts
- Instagram and Facebook
- Registration pages and the email newsletter
Yield
Featuring real instructors and participants made the offering feel credible and welcoming. Showing skill-building moments reduced intimidation far better than generic ad content, and registration-window timing created repeated touchpoints. Qualitative feedback echoed the goal — "I didn't know this existed," "this feels approachable."
What I'd do next
- Add one short participant quote per activity to deepen relatability.
- Build a repeatable "Women in the Outdoors" campaign kit — captions, graphics, cutdowns — for seasonal reuse.
The blog post
Room to blossom
Some of the best places in Oregon can also be the most intimidating to step into for the first time — a climbing wall, a sailboat’s rigging, a mountain-bike trail. Eugene Recreation’s women-led outdoor classes exist to take the edge off that first step, turning spaces that can feel male-dominated into somewhere a beginner can simply show up and learn.
Anne Borland has taught in that world for years. An outdoor instructor with the River House Outdoor Program, she leads women’s sailing and rock climbing — and she has watched what changes when the co-ed pressure lifts. “When we’re separated from the co-ed environment, women tend to blossom better,” she says. “We’re riskier in a safe way. We fail in front of each other.”
That permission to fail is the whole point. A typical women’s class, Borland says, is “friendly and inviting and inclusive. There’s no ego. You don’t have to have any experience” — and you are just as welcome if you have plenty.
What makes it stick is agency. “You can choose to be the bathing beauty on the deck, or you can be at the helm and learn something, or you can teach it to someone,” she says. “You can pick the role you want.” No one is pushed further than they want to go, and no one is held back.
The result is exactly what the program is built for. Without the pressure, Borland says, there is “a lot more joy in learning, at a faster rate.” Show up a beginner, leave a little braver — on the water, on the wall, or on the trail.
Photo gallery
More campaigns
View all work
Hot Takes: Poolside
A get-to-know-you video that introduces Eugene's new city manager over a lineup of progressively spicier wings — built to warm up an all-staff meeting, then recut into a four-part social series for the public.
Banana Ball Comes to Eugene
When Banana Ball came to Eugene for the first time, the City rode the hype with free community events — a youth baseball clinic and a pool pop-up with the players — leading into two sold-out nights at Autzen Stadium. I promoted the events, coordinated media credentials, and photographed everything into a recap and thank-you to the community.
Rec Facility Rentals
A rental-marketing campaign for Eugene Recreation's community centers and event spaces — a venue trailer, facility photography, and one interactive 360° tour housing all eight venues, so renters can walk every room before they ever call.