Just imagine: The school in your neighborhood transforms from a grey concrete playground into a green oasis where students can play freely and learn about nature. A natural, inspiring setting where learning and play are seamlessly combined.

At Nieuwsblad, we have a strong track record of community projects, ranging from the election of the best fries shop in Flanders to the search for the most fun municipality. Two years ago, we started looking for a new approach that would actively engage our community while focusing on our service journalism and regional proposition.

Turning playgrounds green

This led us to focus on the greening of school playgrounds.

It’s a topic close to the hearts of our core target group — people aged 30 to 50 — and it also allows us to focus on a positive story. This fits perfectly within our content mix, where we want to give positive news the attention it deserves.

For a long time, it remained unclear whether Flanders would continue supporting schools in greening their playgrounds. In 2022, Flanders allocated €9 million for green playgrounds, and in 2023 even €20 million. This made the topic highly relevant.

We launched the project through a broad editorial series, including inspiring examples of greened playgrounds and a strong focus on the positive effects of playing in green environments: a green playground stimulates movement, boosts creativity, and contributes to students’ concentration and well-being.

Calls to action

In the first phase, we issued a call to school principals to register their schools. We supported this with a targeted campaign, including direct mailings to schools. Both primary and secondary schools were eligible to participate.

In the second phase, we launched a broad 360° campaign with TV spots, radio, cinema, print ads, and a wide digital and social campaign, encouraging people to vote for the school in their neighborhood via the Nieuwsblad app. All participating schools received a promotional package and were encouraged to run their own campaigns.

In this way, the project truly came to life within schools. Not only principals and teachers, but also students and parents became actively involved and did everything they could to win the grand prize. These campaigns were picked up by our regional journalists and received additional editorial coverage.

In each province, a provincial winner was selected based on the number of votes. Smaller schools were not disadvantaged, as votes were also evaluated proportionally to the number of students.

The five provincial winners were then asked to design a plan and model to convince our jury during a visit to each school. The final winner won €50,000, including an intensive guidance programme.

Strengthening community bonds

With this project, we aimed to strengthen our brand awareness among our core target group: people aged 30 to 50. By focusing on a socially relevant topic that concerns both families and schools, we sought to become more top-of-mind among a younger audience and to reinforce our position as a strongly engaged and socially responsible news brand.

The campaign also acted as a powerful community builder. We activated our readers as active participants rather than passive consumers by encouraging schools, parents, students, and teachers to run their own campaigns.

This increased engagement and strengthened our connection with local communities. A total of 600 schools registered, and 150,000 people voted in our app. Additionally, we focused on driving new app downloads by making voting exclusively available through the app.

This resulted in 50,000 new app downloads. Voters came to our platform, where they could subscribe to our newsletter and were encouraged to explore the full editorial series.

Finally, the campaign also had a strong commercial objective by involving advertisers. Through two main partners, Aveve and VLAM, the project generated €289,000 in advertising revenue.

The second edition of the green playground project ran in early 2026, with the winner announced at the end of May.

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