Creative Brief

In the world of A/E/C proposals, it’s rare to experience a pursuit where the technical staff are as engaged and creative as the marketing staff—but the City of Hampton Fox Hill Watershed Management Plan created just that opportunity! VHB identified the City of Hampton, Virginia, as a target new client, based on their Capital Improvement Program’s alignment with VHB’s strategic goals of expanding our coastal engineering services and leveraging technology to serve our clients. The Fox Hill project was an opportunity that would let us achieve both of those goals: The low-lying community would require a truly creative solution to address impacts from sea-level rise and flooding, and the need to achieve community-buy in would provide opportunities to experiment with technology. But VHB would need to craft a truly compelling story to win such a high-profile project with a new client—and be absolutely certain that the story resonated with the selection committee’s pain points. And did we mention that this project was the third such plan in a series of plans across the city—so we’d also need to out-compete the incumbents for those plans?

Facing an uphill battle, we spent 6 months in strategic positioning, researching the Fox Hill community and the city’s goals for it; meeting with the anticipated selection committee members and building relationships; visiting the site; and building an ArcGIS StoryMap to prove that we truly had unmatched understanding of the project and would be able to start the project ahead of any competitors.