Hudson Lake, a national public relations and visual communications firm, contracted Simple Media to develop an online strategy for 7-Eleven’s long-standing “Operation Chill” initiative. This initiative fosters positive relations between the police and the nation’s youth, enabling officers to reward kids they see exhibiting good behavior with coupons for a free Slurpee® drink.

Prior to this engagement, the three decades long initiative had been run entirely “offline”, tasking Simple Media not only with establishing a brand new digital seat of influence for the program, but also providing much needed digital strategy, assets and support.

The strategy would employ a mixture of branding insights and digital architecture, culminating in an overall approach that would both facilitate the build of Operation Chill’s front-end website, but also the critical mechanisms needed on the back-end.

The “portal” developed by Simple Media was designed to provide surface-level marketing details to police agencies across the country, and then by extension of a vetted registration process, enable participants to login. Naturally, security was top of mind, adhering not only to best practices, but also in compliance with 7-Eleven’s own corporate cybersecurity evaluation standards.

Back-end support required the ability to download important assets (like documentation and promotional material related to the Operation Chill initiative), as well as the ability to request additional Slurpee® coupons for distribution to police personnel. Database reporting would also be necessary to improve 7-Eleven’s overall administration of the program.

The results of 7-elevenoperationchill.com become more and more apparent every day, as manual, paper-driven processes are supplanted with new and improved digital routines.

Within a week of Operation Chill’s digital launch, 7-Eleven received over 100 registrations from law enforcement agencies around the country. Now, well over 300 have joined, actively participating in this noble cause.