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.
Written piece
Photo gallery
