Here is a question I get asked more often these days: how do you build an audience for something that doesn’t exist yet?
It is one of the hardest problems in communications, and it is very different from the work most agencies do. When a brand already has customers, a history, and a following, you are amplifying. You have something to pull on. When you are launching, you have none of that. No audience to activate. Not a legacy to reference. No proof that anyone should care. Just a vision and the work required to make strangers care about something that did not exist yesterday.
That was the CalHOPE Courage Award, and my boutique marketing agency in Tampa was brought in to make its first year count.
Why the first year decides everything
The CalHOPE Courage Award was created to recognize courageous student-athletes at universities across California. First of its kind. Genuinely meaningful. And completely unknown to every single person it needed to reach.
Here is what people underestimate about an inaugural launch: the real cost of a weak one is not low nomination numbers. It is that the student-athletes the award was built to honor never get their moment, because the coaches who should have nominated them never heard about it in the first place.
Collegiate athletics runs on relationships and reputation. A launch that fails to generate momentum sends a signal that the award is not serious, and that perception travels fast. You do not really get a second first year.
Borrowed credibility is real credibility
So we built and ran a full social campaign: content that told the story of the award, explained its purpose, and gave universities a clear reason to nominate their most deserving student-athletes. Targeted paid social on Instagram and Facebook. Stories and Reels built specifically to be shared, not just seen. Strategic hashtags that pushed reach toward coaches, athletic directors, and administrators across the state.
But the piece I would point to first is the collaborations.
We secured NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott and NBA All-Star Kevin Love as partners in the campaign. That is not a vanity name-drop. When you have no track record of your own, the fastest legitimate way to earn trust is to stand next to people who already have it, in front of the exact audience you need. A coach who has never heard of the CalHOPE Courage Award has absolutely heard of Ronnie Lott. That association does in one post what months of organic content might not do at all.
We had run this play before
This was not our first launch of this kind, and that mattered.
Bee Young Comms first partnered with Doug Drotman on the Mayo Clinic Comeback Player Award, a national campaign recognizing the top comeback players in Division I football. That work produced three high-profile winners in 2021: Aidan Hutchinson at Michigan, McKenzie Milton at FSU, and J.J. Weaver at Kentucky.
The ask and the result
When it was time to launch something new, Doug came back. That is the part I am proudest of. A launch is a leap of faith for a client. Choosing to take that leap with the same partner a second time says more than any metric I could put in a case study.
The inaugural CalHOPE Courage Award launched with nominations in hand, an engaged audience, and the kind of credibility most first-year programs spend multiple seasons trying to build. From day one, it was established as a meaningful recognition in California collegiate athletics.
“Michelle consistently demonstrated an outstanding ability to strategize and execute compelling paid social media campaigns. Her deep understanding of collegiate athletics was a real plus. I am confident that Michelle will bring value to any project or team.”
Doug Drotman, Owner, Drotman Communications
And it is still going
Here is the part that means the most to me.
The CalHOPE Courage Award has been presented every month since February 2022. It is still running today. Two student-athletes at California colleges and universities are honored each month for overcoming the stress, anxiety, and mental trauma tied to personal hardship, and at the end of each school year, two of those monthly honorees are named the annual winners, with a donation made toward mental health services in each of their names.
(Updated Blog in 2026): The 2026 winners are Andrea Kitahata, a soccer standout who graduated from Stanford and now plays for Gotham FC in the NWSL, and Dorian Darghali, a freshman at California Lutheran University who has become a vocal advocate for stronger mental health support for student-athletes. Before them came Mya Wang and Will Bermudez in 2025, Cameron Nelsen and Myron “MJ” Amey in 2024, Anysa and Amaya Gray and Nigel Wilson in 2023, and Julia Schwayder and Breyon Jackson in the very first year.
The award is now presented by College Sports Communicators in association with The Associated Press, CalHOPE, and the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Mental Wellbeing. It has its own audience, its own history, and its own reputation. It does not need a launch campaign anymore.
That is what a successful launch actually looks like. Not a spike in engagement, but a program that outlives the campaign that introduced it, and years of student-athletes who got their moment because the coaches around them knew this award existed.
What this means for you
Every organization, award, product, or initiative has a first chapter. How that chapter gets written determines whether there is a second one.
If you are launching something new, the strategy behind the launch matters as much as the idea itself. A great idea introduced badly looks like a small idea. The work is figuring out who needs to care, what would make them care, and whose credibility you can stand next to while you build your own.
We have launched new things from nothing before. We know what it takes to make a new thing feel necessary.
Bee Young Comms is here for You!
Meet this year’s honorees at calhopecourageaward.org. To learn more about what Bee Young Comms can do for you or your team, contact us today.
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