Seventy-five percent of Americans dream of starting their own business. Intuit’s Just Start campaign was designed to spark an entrepreneurial revolution by inspiring, empowering and guiding Americans to achieve this dream.

While 4 million small businesses use Intuit’s QuickBooks, many new entrepreneurs are unaware of the need for financial software. Therefore, along with providing inspiration and guidance, the campaign was created to distribute copies of Intuit’s free entry-level QuickBooks Simple Start accounting software.

Campaign Components
With a budget of $1.2 million, Intuit, Access Communications and Grow Marketing developed the campaign to include the following creative components:

* A contest to win a $50,000 small business grant: Intuit launched an interactive website, IWillJustStart.com, where people could enter the contest, make a pledge, get how-to business tips and join an online community. For the contest, entrants submitted letters or videos describing their business dream and how they’d use the grant.

* In-market events: Intuit launched interactive Just Start events in four busy commuter hubs across the country like Grand Central Station in New York. At each event, budding entrepreneurs drew inspiration from local entrepreneurs, obtained expert advice from local business experts and received free copies of Simple Start.

* Viral buzz: Intuit designed IWillJustStart.com to be highly viral. People could easily rate contest entries, post comments and send their entries to family and friends. The public was also called to select the grand winner, choosing among five finalists. To further maximize word of mouth, Intuit made extensive outreach to bloggers and selected small business bloggers as judges for the contest.

Results
* Received 2500 contest entries and pledges with 22,000 votes cast.
* Over 130,000 people were touched by the events.
* Distributed over 300,000 CDs and downloads of QuickBooks Simple Start.
* Obtained over 80 blog postings about the campaign.

Client: Intuit Inc.
Agency: Access Communications; Grow Marketing
Budget: $1.2 Million
Date of Campaign: Oct. 15, 2007 - February 11, 2008
Case Study URL: www.iwilljuststart.com