Trev’s Winter Adventure: The Award-Winning Campaign Keeping Kids Swimming Through Winter

How a 10-week, multi-venue campaign helped keep families swimming through winter — and went on to win the 2025 ASSA (Australian Swim Schools Association) National Gold Marketing & Communications Award.

T&C's - Trev’s Adventure – Brought to You by Vorgee and Rackley Swimming.pdf

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Winter can be a challenging season for swimming schools.

As temperatures drop, routines change, school holidays approach and families become less inclined to get into the pool each week. For a business built around consistent weekly attendance, keeping children motivated to continue their swimming journey through the colder months is an important challenge.

In 2025, Rackley Swimming, owned by City Venue Management, tackled that challenge with Trev’s Winter Adventure: Swim to Win — a 10-week promotional campaign designed to give families another reason to show up, participate and keep swimming throughout winter.

The campaign ultimately became much more than an attendance promotion. It transformed weekly swimming lessons into a collectable adventure, brought the Rackley brand to life across venues and social media, created opportunities for families to discover some of Southeast Queensland’s biggest attractions, and was later recognised with the ASSA (Australian Swim Schools Association) National Gold Marketing & Communications Award for 2025.

The Challenge: Keeping Kids Swimming Through Winter

The campaign was built around a simple business objective: encourage consistent attendance during a season when swimming lesson participation can naturally decline.

Rather than creating a promotion that required families to purchase something additional or complete a complicated competition mechanic, the campaign rewarded a behaviour families were already expected to do — attend their weekly swimming lesson.

Every active Rackley Swimming member enrolled in a Learn to Swim program could participate.

The more families engaged with their weekly lessons, the more opportunities they had to collect the pieces of Trev’s adventure and enter the weekly draws.

It was a simple idea with an important underlying message:

Showing up matters.

From Swimming Lesson to Southeast Queensland Adventure

At the heart of the campaign was Trev, Rackley Swimming’s much-loved mascot and featured character, who became the guide for families throughout their winter adventure.

Across 10 weeks, families had the opportunity to win a different experience, with one family of four winning each week.

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The prize pool was valued at up to $5,000, featuring experiences designed to appeal to families across Southeast Queensland.

The adventures included family passes to:

• Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary

• Warner Bros. Movie World

• A Hot Air Balloon family experience

• The Wheel of Brisbane and South Bank experience

• A family Go-Karting experience

• Chermside waterpark

• Bli Bli Aqua Park

• Dreamworld

• Hijinks Hotel escape room

• Surfers Paradise experiences

• Australia Zoo

Each prize gave families something new to look forward to and helped turn the campaign into a journey rather than a one-off competition.

Taking Ownership of the Campaign

I joined City Venue Management after the campaign had already been conceived and developed. I wasn't involved in the original conception or creative development of Trev’s Winter Adventure. Instead, I was onboarded into the business and took ownership of the campaign as it moved into execution. From that point, my role was to help bring the campaign to life across the Rackley Swimming network and manage the moving parts required to deliver it successfully from launch through to completion.

This included helping define and refine the terms and conditions, promotional mechanics, entry process and weekly prize-draw process, ensuring there was a clear and workable customer journey from attendance through to entry and winner selection.

Taking over an established campaign at this stage required more than simply delivering creative assets. It meant understanding the original strategy, identifying what needed to happen operationally, coordinating the different elements of the campaign and ensuring the experience remained consistent across participating venues.

With Rackley Swimming venues participating across the network, execution at scale became a key focus.

A Simple Mechanic: Show Up, Collect, Scan, Enter

The customer journey was intentionally straightforward.

Each week, participating families would:

1. Attend their weekly swimming lesson

Their attendance unlocked their next piece of the adventure.

2. Collect their unique adventure sticker

Children received a limited-edition sticker as part of the exclusive Rackley Swimming adventure set.

3. Scan the QR code

The QR code connected the physical campaign experience to the digital competition entry.

4. Upload their sticker and enter the weekly draw

Families submitted their sticker to go into that week's prize draw.

Then, the following week, there was another adventure to discover.

The mechanic created a natural reason to return week after week, while the collectable element gave children something tangible to engage with.

Turning the Campaign Into a Physical Experience

One of the most important aspects of the campaign was ensuring that it didn't exist solely online.

The campaign was physically embedded throughout Rackley Swimming venues, creating an immersive experience for families as soon as they entered their local swim school centre.

Campaign execution included:

• Adventure sticker booklets

• Children's passports

• An adventure map

• Collectable weekly stickers

• QR-code entry points

• A2 snap frames

• Posters

• Floor vinyls

• Lanyards

• Trev standees

• Trev dress-up activations

• Activities within the booklet

• Sponsor features

• Social media assets

• Weekly prize-draw communications

The passport and sticker journey were particularly important because they gave children something they could physically collect and interact with.

Instead of simply telling families about a competition, the campaign gave children an adventure to complete.

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Bringing Trev’s Adventure to Life on Social Media

The campaign also provided a strong storytelling platform for social media.

Rather than treating each weekly prize as an isolated competition, content followed Trev as he explored the different adventure destinations.

This allowed the campaign to move between the physical swimming centres and the digital world, giving families a reason to keep checking in and discover where Trev was heading next.

The content helped showcase the experiences families could win while reinforcing the wider campaign message of adventure, family, connection and participation.

The objective wasn't just to say:

“Enter this week's competition.”

It was to create anticipation around:

“Where is Trev going next?”

That distinction helped give the campaign a consistent narrative across its 10-week run.

Making the Campaign Work Across Every Venue

Rackley Swimming operates across a large network of venues, making consistency and staff engagement critical to the campaign's success.

A national or multi-venue campaign can have excellent creative and strategy behind it, but ultimately the customer experiences it through the people working at their local swimming centre.

That made venue staff activation a major part of the execution.

Teams needed to understand the promotion, communicate the mechanic to families, distribute stickers, encourage participation and help create excitement around the weekly adventures.

The campaign therefore required collaboration between marketing and venue teams to ensure that what families saw online matched what they experienced when they arrived for their lesson.

For me, taking ownership of the campaign meant helping connect those moving parts — from the promotional mechanics and campaign assets through to the customer-facing execution inside venues.

More Than a Competition

What made Trev’s Winter Adventure particularly effective was that the campaign wasn't asking families to change their behaviour.

It took something they were already doing — attending their weekly swimming lesson — and gave that behaviour an additional layer of excitement.

A regular swimming lesson became:

Attend → Collect → Scan → Enter → Adventure.

And then the process started again the following week.

The campaign also reinforced a broader message around consistency.

Learning to swim is a journey. Progress doesn't happen overnight, and maintaining regular attendance is an important part of building confidence and skills in the water.

By making attendance feel rewarding and giving children something to look forward to each week, Trev’s Winter Adventure helped connect the promotional mechanic with the broader purpose of swimming lessons.

The Role of Sponsorship

The campaign was brought to families with the support of Vorgee, a well known Australian Aquatic Retail Brand who sponsored the promotion and helped bring the adventure prize pool to life.

Sponsor integration was incorporated across the campaign's relevant physical and digital assets, creating visibility for the partnership while keeping the customer experience at the centre of the promotion.

This provided another example of how a strong campaign can create value across multiple stakeholders — the swimming business, families, children, venue teams and campaign sponsor.

The Result: National Recognition

In 2025, the campaign was awarded the National Gold Marketing & Communications Award by the Australian Swim Schools Association (ASSA) — recognising the impact and execution of Trev’s Winter Adventure.

While the award was a true team achievement, it also reflected the significant contribution I made in taking ownership of the campaign and driving its execution from start to finish. I played a key role in shaping the promotional mechanics and terms and conditions, managing the competition and weekly prize-draw process, coordinating campaign delivery across venues and bringing the campaign to life across its physical and digital touchpoints.

The campaign went on to become one of Rackley Swimming’s biggest and most successful winter retention campaigns and competitions to date, with the award serving as a meaningful recognition of the collective effort — and the significant work that went into making the campaign a success.

The recognition was a significant result for a campaign that set out to solve a very practical marketing challenge: how do we keep families engaged with swimming lessons during winter?

The answer was to make showing up feel like the beginning of something exciting.

The Power of Showing Up

Looking back at Trev’s Winter Adventure, one of the strongest lessons for me was the importance of execution. The original campaign concept had already been developed when I joined City Venue Management. My role was to step into an established campaign, understand the strategy behind it and take ownership of bringing it together across the business.

That meant helping shape the promotional mechanics and terms and conditions, coordinating the weekly competition and draw process, supporting the campaign rollout, managing the customer journey and ensuring the campaign was activated consistently across venues and channels.

It was a true end-to-end execution — from the physical experience inside the swimming centres to the digital storytelling that followed Trev's adventures throughout Southeast Queensland.

And ultimately, the campaign achieved what it set out to do: give families another reason to keep swimming through winter. Because sometimes the most effective marketing doesn't ask customers to do something completely new.

It takes something they already value — showing up for their child's swimming lesson — and gives them a reason to be excited about doing it again next week.

Trev’s Winter Adventure turned attendance into an adventure, swimming lessons into a journey, and winter into a season worth showing up for.

And taking home a National Gold Marketing & Communications Award made the adventure even more memorable.