Compelling campaigns that make history come alive.
The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation and its living-history museums are located in the heart of Virginia’s Historic Triangle in Williamsburg. Through immersive actor portrayals and meticulously crafted historical recreations, visitors gain a first-hand understanding of how early settlers and Indigenous communities built their societies, traditions, and ways of life.
As a longstanding partner of Ciniva, JYF has benefited from our expertise in campaign strategy, launch, and management—as well as website design and development, digital marketing, social media management, and SEO. Notable projects include the award-winning Tenacity campaign, the engaging History at Home initiative, and the impactful FOCUSED: A Century of Virginia Indian Resilience exhibition campaign.
Communicating tenacity without sacrificing historical integrity
This exhibition offered an in-depth look at the lives of three remarkable women and their experiences during the early days of colonization. To effectively measure the impact of our marketing efforts, we recommended the creation of a dedicated microsite featuring videos, detailed information, and educational resources related to the exhibition. This served not only as a central landing page for potential visitors, but also provided the flexibility to design fresh, custom visuals that shaped the entire campaign’s look and feel.
Advancing the campaign through new marketing tools
Museum visitors, day-trippers, weekend explorers, and history buffs all rely on their mobile devices to plan and discover experiences. After building the destination website, our next challenge was driving qualified traffic. We launched mobile-first campaigns using Facebook Instant Experience ads, Instagram Story ads, and targeted programmatic advertising to capture attention where it mattered most—on mobile screens. These experiential formats let us showcase rich visuals and, once we captured that initial engagement, encouraged users to dive deeper by choosing a story to explore.
Building upon past knowledge using similar tools
Using what we learned from the previous campaign, we knew we could gain increased conversions by going with the microsite marketing approach. This led us to creating flexible designs that JYF could deploy quickly and easily for new campaigns. A simple swap of media, copy, and fonts was all that was needed to deploy landing pages for the summer season.
Engaging viewers with new content
The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation keeps its exhibitions and storytelling fresh by regularly introducing new topics, content, and experiences for visitors to enjoy. With each new exhibition, campaign, and event, updated creative assets are developed to maintain excitement and relevance. Ciniva supports this effort by coordinating and refreshing marketing materials to prevent audience fatigue, ensuring that ads remain engaging and that interest stays high—ultimately driving ticket sales and museum visits.
History from the comfort of your own home
We partnered with the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation to extend their historical resources to audiences at home, delivering a rich library of educational content, video lessons, and more. Our thoughtful campaigns drove a significant increase in website traffic, keeping JYF top-of-mind for history enthusiasts. This effort would ultimately contribute to a rise in on-site visits.
Transforming website traffic into foot traffic
After the online campaign, we launched a targeted retargeting strategy aimed at converting digital interest into museum foot traffic. This approach successfully re-engaged the audience and drove a noticeable increase in in-person visits to both locations.
