Cows & Contemporary Art Month

Reflecting on CowParade San Antonio 2025

Every March, Contemporary Art Month takes place in San Antonio, Texas. Museums, galleries, and artist collectives activate throughout the city, filling our streets with talent, creativity, and community spirit. This Contemporary Art Month, our CE team has been reflecting on one of our largest projects of 2025.
Our client, CHRISTUS Children’s Foundation, was chosen as the non-profit partner for CowParade San Antonio 2025. CowParade – the world’s largest annual public art campaign – travels to different cities each year, engaging local artists to transform life-size fiberglass cow sculptures which are then displayed throughout the host city and auctioned off to benefit a local charity. The CE Group was brought in as a key strategic partner to shape the campaign’s identity, build momentum across the 14-month rollout, create the public relations and marketing plan, community engagement, and event infrastructure needed to turn a citywide art installation into a high-impact fundraising movement.

Goals and objectives

• Create messaging that aligned CowParade with CHRISTUS Children’s Foundation’s mission, values, and specific goals for the funds raised through this campaign.
• Secure massive coverage for our threefold mission and message, which can be summed up by the tagline we created: “Celebrate San Antonio. Embrace the Arts. Support Children’s Health Care.”
• Reach different audiences throughout each campaign phase: 100+ artists, the public, sponsors, and buyers.
• Produce three major events: an artist kickoff party, a preview party of the completed cows, and an auction – all while remaining profitable.

Research & Planning

We spent weeks researching CowParade, CHRISTUS Children’s Foundation, San Antonio’s artist community, venues, advertising opportunities, and our target audiences. In addition to ongoing support and internal communication, our timeline of objectives and planning revolved around four main phases, each with particular audiences, goals, and events: Artist Recruitment and Kickoff Party, Campaign Mission and Preview Party, The Grazing Period, and The Auctions.

Artist Recruitment and Kickoff Party

Our first target audience was artists. With 85 blank cows, we needed to recruit over a hundred artists to submit designs for CowParade to choose from. In order to reach as many artists as possible on a tight budget and timeline, we created and posted social media content, designed a landing page for the website, posted the opportunity to community calendars, and secured earned media promotion across television and online news platforms. We then hit the streets in person, traveling to each artist gallery across the city to pass out flyers and recruit artists, building out a contact list along the way. Once we had recruited our artists, our team produced “From Palette to Pasture: Artist Herd Kick-Off Celebration”, at AnArte Gallery to create a sense of community and build excitement amongst the artists and the media.

Campaign Mission and Preview Party

While the artists worked on their cows, we positioned the campaign as a citywide cultural moment. Our Creative Team designed a campaign identity through thoughtful graphic design, building on the original global CowParade logo and creating a San Antonio–inspired version with a distinctly local twist. Across event signage, printed collateral, press kits, t-shirts, event swag, a custom Fiesta medal, stakeholder toolkits, and all digital assets, this identity carried through our communication to board members, artists, sponsors, the media, the public, and community partners.
We continued to push out our tagline, “Celebrate San Antonio. Embrace the Arts. Support Children’s Health Care,” through paid ads, earned coverage, and social media. We placed an ad in the Battle of Flowers program and passed out thousands of branded cowbells at the parade. We kept most of our messaging fun and catchy by using dozens of cow and art puns, like, “Have you herd? The stampede is coming!”, “Join the Cow-mmunity!”, “Check out our udderly talented artists”, and “Mooooo-ve over, Michelangelo!”. We also addressed the seriousness of the campaign’s mission by pushing patient impact.
To boost excitement for the completed cow sculptures’ citywide public display, we threw “Gallery in the Gardens: CowParade Preview Party” at the Botanical Gardens, inviting artists, patients, hospital staff, potential buyers, media, sponsors, and other stakeholders to see a selection of the completed cows. Our Communication Team created press kits, managed the run-of-show, script writing, and created all copy and graphics needed for the event with our Creative team. Our Events team handled all logistics, from entertainment to security to catering.

The Grazing Period

The cows were stationed at dozens of San Antonio hotspots and landmarks, from the Alamo to Pearl to Hemisfair. To spark public participation, we launched a citywide scavenger hunt with a custom Google Map and partnered with KSAT to spotlight a public choice “Community Cow,” expanding reach through earned media and community storytelling. Our public relations experts also secured experiential brand activations at La Cantera, the UTSA Art Festival, and Pearl, deepening engagement and maintaining campaign visibility.
We worked with a website designer to build out an interactive website and wrote 85 artist and cow bios. We equipped each artist, sponsor, and display location partner with personalized toolkits of graphics and FAQs they could use to promote the campaign.
Our team continued to coordinate media interviews, managed social media, and supported magazine features, including articles we wrote for San Antonio Woman and 78209 Magazine.

The Auctions

The campaign culminated in two auctions: a live auction “Art on the Range” at The Red Berry Estate, where a dozen of the “moo-sterpieces” were sold to in-person and online bidders; and an online auction that staggered the bids over the course of two weeks. Leading up to the auction, we continued to push press releases and media alerts, promote through social media, and assist in placing buyers in seats. We worked hand-in-hand with our auction partners to build out the auction websites, finalize logistics, and streamline the bidding process. We scripted the entire run-of-show for the live auction, our events team handled all production aspects, and our creative team produced every branded and printed item. Both auctions were massive successes, exceeding our expectations for funds raised.

Success

Our integrated communications led to over a hundred artist submissions, surpassing what we needed for our original 75 cows, allowing us to sell even more cows. We earned CHRISTUS Children’s Foundation massive coverage about their mission and community involvement through a news reach of 157.28M and a total Advertising Value Equivalent of $1.91M. We helped to secure several campaign sponsors to fund the project along the way. We produced three major events and several public activations. Finally, every single cow sold. The auctions raised over $825,000 in total. The average purchase of a cow surpassed CowParade’s previous averages. These results made our campaign profitable and successful on all fronts.

As we reflect on Contemporary Art Month, we are reminded of the importance of community-driven art that serves to transform the spaces they occupy while inspiring connection and contributions. When creativity is paired with purpose, organizations amplify their mission, artists are given a platform, and the audience experiences impactful and meaningful events.