Forget bake sales and walking your neighbour’s dog, in Fall 2012, SCENE gave students an opportunity to work with their peers and get creative with how they fund their education. To do this, High Road joined together with SCENE, the popular entertainment loyalty program from Cineplex Entertainment and Scotiabank, and Redwood Strategic, to run the SCENEster campaign.

So what’s SCENEster?

It’s a series of contests and initiatives that rewarded one lucky student with a $5,000 scholarship. SCENE and Redwood selected 20 student leaders (and their associated organizations) from across Canada to compete in a series of challenges. SCENE provided $35,000 in sponsorship and prizes to students participating and helped them raise awareness for each club nationwide.  In addition to the scholarship funding, students were trained in skills such as marketing, presentations, working in groups and dealing with media – skills they can take with them beyond their time in academia.

To help publicize the students’ efforts, High Road developed a community media relations program.  By working with local media in the different regions, we helped to shine a light on their community work and progress with the challenges, all while highlighting their charitable initiatives.

At the end of the three month campaign, Christina Wong was the winner from University of British Columbia (UBC). Wong chose to donate her $5,000 SCENE scholarship to World Vision, a charity she is closely involved with at UBC. She also got to treat nine friends to a Canadian movie premiere courtesy of SCENE. The second place winner was Ian Watson from Laurier’s Fashion ‘n Motion and third place was Laura Mitchell from the Trent University Synchro Club.

High Road was honoured to partner up with SCENE and Redwood Strategic on this campaign that helped students achieve skills that they will use for a lifetime.

To learn more, head to www.scene.ca.

This blog is brought to you by High Road’s Tania DiVito and Rayanne Langdon:

You get 60 of Toronto’s top chefs together under one roof to celebrate their love of food in support of the city’s largest food rescue program.

Last month, High Road Communications teamed up with Second Harvest to promote the 22^nd Toronto Taste event at the Royal Ontario Museum.  The annual soiree, which is one of the city’s largest and most coveted culinary affairs, drew in more than 1,400 guests and saw the likes of celebrity Food Network stars such as Bob Blumer, Roger Mooking, Lynn Crawford and Mark McEwan.

The event theme was to recognize the importance of food rescue and was designed to empower Torontonians to give back to the community.  For each ticket sold, 250 meals are provided to those in need; this year enough money was raised to deliver more than 670,000 meals!

High Road was honoured to partner with Second Harvest to help increase awareness of the event and drive ticket sales through a strategic PR and social media approach.

The result? A unique experience for food lovers around the city; tons of event buzz both online and offline(with attention from top tier outlets like Global Morning, CityNews, Huffington Post, Toronto Life and more), a foray into a new social media channel (Instagram), and growth of existing owned properties for Second Harvest.

But as with any food event, the dishes took centre stage. Rubbing elbows with some of Canada’s top chefs was just a delicious bonus.

If you couldn’t make it out to the annual Toronto Taste this year, you can still support Second Harvest by donating online.

Hockey fever took over Ottawa last month, not only because of the much-anticipated NHL All-Star Game, but also because Bauer launched its revolutionary RE-AKT helmet.

RE-AKT is the first hockey helmet designed to specifically manage the multiple type of hits in the game, including rotational-force impacts, which have been scientifically proven to cause significant head injuries.

In the spotlight at Bauer’s announcement was Claude Giroux of the Philadelphia Flyers, and the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Steven Stamkos.

Media from across North America packed into the launch, including CBC, USA Today, The Globe and Mail and TSN.

A huge congrats to Bauer, for continuing to pave the way as an innovator in concussion prevention and player safety.