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Thank you so much CAEP I'm loving this virtual format as I know many of you are, in terms of just our COVID world. But Marianne Collin and I are here from Full Capacity Marketing and we're so excited to share with you. Speaking of COVID, recruiting adult learners during COVID and really how to help overcome some, of the barriers your learners are facing in our virtual world. I'm Celina Shands, I'm the CEO and founder of Full Capacity Marketing and welcome to everyone today.

We are going to be using the chat box a lot so we'd love for you to introduce yourself and give us a number one challenge you are facing in terms of recruiting students. We asked that yesterday during our session with three panelists who has done a fantastic job in terms of doing regional outreach. So we're going to dive in a little bit deeper into that today.

Just a little bit about our company and have the pleasure of working with many of you on the call today and we've been around for 18 years. We are communications experts, and workforce, and education, and we have more than 500 plus organizations. We've campaigns around student recruitment and retention as well as getting employers engaged with your mission and that is really our passion and we love the missions that you work with and that's what we do every day.

I wanted to share a little bit about this quote from Sharon Bonney, who was just on our last session with us and she's executive director CEO of COABE and we did a campaign for her which many of you may have heard about educate and elevate. It was a national campaign but she talks about our secret sauce and we're going to share our secret sauce with you today which is about our ability to utilize and leverage what we call psychographic profiles. Don't get scared off by that word, we're going to really dive in because it's about building tailored messages that resonate with your audience.

And we're going to really focus on that a lot because you can do all the advertising and outreach in the world but if it's not the right emotional message that's connecting with your students that you're trying to recruit in then it's just a waste of investment. Is one of the things we do really, really well at FCM here and the leader behind that effort is really Marianne and Connelyn. And Marianne, would you like to introduce yourself? Because Marianne is our resident data geek. I'll just say that which she's got a lot more qualifications in loading data.

Hi, everyone. It's so exciting to see you and I definitely going to talk about getting the word out because I keep people seeing that is the challenge in the chat box. So if you have other challenges you want to address please put those in there too.

My background is from consumer marketing, I worked with Avocados from Mexico who was responsible for their digital strategy. Bringing them kind of up to what we can know today. I've also worked for a number of other large consumer companies. But one of the most exciting and fulfilling things I did was teach and I taught Adjunct for 14 years for a variety of schools including a few in this Cal State, Uc Berkeley, and even the University of Hong Kong, online and on campus, and hybrids.

So I kind of feel like I've been here before. I kind of know what you guys are going through in terms of transitioning things online but what really excites me is working in this field and helping you recruit adult learners. And how we do that as Celina said, a lot about data and a lot about understanding the people, their fears, their hopes, their motivations, and we put that together for our secret sauce.

It's our secret sauce we're giving away the secret sauce today. I love it Marianne.

I'm sorry.

We want to give you a lot of tools to help you because this is a tough time. And so what we're going to do is kind of break out the session in a couple of ways here and again, keep the chat going. I see a couple of, actually, Marianne say, a couple of really key challenges dealing with online and technology and we're going to actually get into that today.

Today's outreach really requires a new engagement lens and we need to understand that in order to create strategies that are going to bring people in the door and help them bring awareness. We're going to start off with that and then, we're going to give you some very, very strong tactical things that you can go with right away this afternoon and execute on. One is, why do you need to rethink your website and consider landing pages for recruitment purposes? So we'll get into that.

Here's the psychographics and persona, how to target different types of students which is really important during COVID and also to tie-in to our diversity, our equity, and inclusion goals. How do we reach them? How do we target those using this secret sauce, psychographics, and personas? And then how to identify gaps in your own current outreach and move them online?

And then another tactical thing, how texting social media and what we call OTT which Mariane will explain can target hard-to-reach populations? So those are our topics. If there are others as we're going through the session today, either myself or Marianne are going to be tag teaming in the chat to make sure you get all your questions answered.

So that's the lineup for today and Marianne I'm going to toss it to you because you are our resident data expert and you just actually texted me today and said, hey, check out this new strato. Campaign for your first workshop which is an employer engagement, I didn't get it in time but you're always looking at research. So help us understand what's happening and why the new engagement lenses require.

All righty, let's put those up there then. We'll take a look and see those. So I think these are things that a lot of you are aware of. Access, obviously, that's a big issue. Device and internet access as well as a place to study and that's really one that sometimes gets a little bit overlooked.

In crowded households which we often see, in underserved communities, or even in some places where a large household that's very noisy, place to study is as important as device and internet access. Added concerns and we know the concerns that the people that we serve have but now they're even more playing a bigger role. Particularly, in the health area and with child care which obviously has been really shaky this last six, seven months. And trust and this was one of the things that came out for some strata research this morning that I saw that we have been seeing little bits and pieces of this over the last couple of months.

The message that education equals better jobs is being eroded and you can see that particularly in the hospitality sector. You've been training, working, and offering courses in the hospitality sector or if you've been offering courses that are training people for administrative jobs. A lot of these things are just going away or have gone away for the last seven months. And people say, wait a minute, I'm doing training. How do you prove to me that education is going to get me a better job because I'm seeing people with great jobs getting laid off.

And then outreach challenges that everybody in the chat box has been talking about that we can't have events, we can't put out flyers, it's difficult to go to offsite events with our nonprofit partners, how do we get hold of people. And then finally media patterns and this impacts everybody. Social media and OTT which you can really think about is streaming, Pandora, Netflix, things like that, they're playing a bigger role now. Traditional media is less effective now that so much of life is connected online and even their patterns are changing.

We just talk a little bit and you know we could change these numbers every day because new numbers keep coming out but we'll just kind of go with this that the COVID impact on adult learner enrollment. The community college and adult education numbers are down about 7.5% in enrollment. And as some of you have mentioned in the chat box, a lot of that's on the most underserved demographics and we see that popping up in a couple of different places.

Pell grants are down, ESL courses are down, ABE courses are down. We know that even in places where enrollment is even or even increasing that's not the same people, that is not that community that we're trying to serve. So there's serious equity issues here that we did not see during the Great Recession and most of that is related to going online.

And just to get a little more detail on that. This time is different than the last recession. And number one is access and this is a study we recently did a 1,500 students at the Diablo Valley College and we just asked them, do they have a laptop? Do they have they share one? Do they have their own smartphone?

And as you can see, they're a good percentage of people had their own personal laptop or desktop computer. But notably less in Hispanic and African-American communities. But everybody, almost everybody had their own cell phone.

But then when we look a little closer, we're look at the types of access and that's a lot of times what you are seeing is the very small percentage who don't have internet access at home. But we ask this question just as a thought, because I think that day my internet was really bad so I threw in this question and this question is, I have internet access at home but it is terrible. 33% of the students agreed with that.

So that's another issue that we have to think about as people do have internet access but it's not necessarily the best. 60% of this group had internet access at home. But I think that what we want to really think about is, what does that mean? So when we're looking at different groups of people it's not just device access, internet access, it's how good is it.

And then just looking at one more thing is just looking at the job lost. We know that we have high rates of job loss with women African-Americans and Latinos and we know we have heard this over and over. So I think we don't need to belabor that point, we know that this is a she session to a large extent. But we also know that Hispanic and-- the one other thing to put on top of this your lower income tech users are also going to be concerned about paying for broadband and paying for cell phone bills and I think anybody who has a broadband or a cell phone bill can relate to that.

How much is this about? How much am I paying? Well, obviously that's going to impact lower paid households much more heavily. OK, now you can go on to the next slide.

And then of course, and again, a housing issue with income. Low income renters are most at the most at risk of eviction and that seems to be kind of an ongoing terror in many people's lives. Because we have more moratoriums and they might end, and then they don't end it, then they might end tomorrow, and they might end next week, and this is just causes stress. Make a move on.

And then, what taking a look at one of these things and it is something to think about during the Great Recession, part time enrollment increased while full time enrollment declined. But this time it's issues like child care and crowded living conditions and the health of family members that are impacting the ability of students to attend class. So take a look at your part time and your full time enrollment. For those of you who are in the community college space, you may have more of the full time enrollment in the adult schools. There's probably more part time but taking a look at those numbers it just gives them one more data point to track.

And then finally, as we talked about child care, now, this is, again, is another moving target with kids going to school in some places, not going to school in other places, going to school part time, two, three days a week. This is a real burden, particularly on essential workers, because they can't plan their schedules. So I think I've heard some of you have been opening up child care centers, and that's really making-- we're seeing the ones that are opening child care centers or have the ability to partner with one are seeing some increases in enrollment.

So now this is number five. During the Great Recession, government financial support was not as good as it was this time, and we learned a lot. It does not look like the next stimulus is going through any time soon, though we don't really know, but we're hoping that at some point we will see some additional help for our lowest income population, but again, back to this, less connection between education and a stable job because we're not, as you can see on this chart, we're not coming back as quickly as we did in the Great Recession.

And again, just taking this a little bit closer is looking at these are the biggest issues, and we asked people what were their biggest issues. The kind of turquoise bar is the need to watch children. The illness is very small. That's the purple bar, but the yellow bar that you see up there, limited access to technology. And again, we have to think about this not just as not having broadband at home, but having terrible broadband at home.

And that second one, that orange one, is limited digital literacy, and we're going to get back to this a little bit later. This is the fear, the fear of being able to do it, and there's some ways that we're going to talk to you about how to talk to your students to assure that they can do it.

Definitely. Yeah. I think that's such a great summary you provided and how different it is this time around, Marianne. And Kelly made a great point in our chat here. And she goes, we haven't closed K through 12 schools like this before, which is a huge piece to keeping students away, and that comment alone speaks to why proactive outreach and communications is so critical right now, especially because of COVID.

And the other thing we have to think about is that people are getting message overload. You got the election. You've got all this information about COVID floating around. What do we do? It's in a state of chaos. And so how do you cut through the noise and create these new strategies in terms of COVID-19. So let's go into that. Marianne, I see there's one question there you can answer about the BBC survey here, but there's three things we're going to talk about today.

One is-- and these are the tactical things that you can go through, new strategies for COVID-19. One is optimizing enrollment systems for virtual recruiting, and we're going to talk about streamlining the website to inform quickly and also focusing on virtual assets to connecting students to staff, and we're going to have some case studies here. We're going to show you what we did, how we did it to give you that information, and then some examples that you can pull from.

The next thing we're going to talk about is flipping the message for today's COVID-19 environment. For students, focus more on the ability to succeed and less on the outcomes. Employers are another story that we'll get into. That's really focusing more on outcomes, but that was in our previous session as well. So you can pull handouts from that session. And then considering just new ways of doing things, really. And that is doing more on your social media and not giving up on non-virtual recruiting, just changing some of the tactics. I may touch on a little bit about employers today. We'll see how that goes.

So let's start with the first one, and that's really optimizing your recruitment. Why should you rethink your website presence? Now, when we've got all these wonderful websites up here-- and they are fantastic. They're optimized for current students. There is a lot of information to go through. If you look at your own website or any of these that we have up here, there's a lot of text images, and it takes five to six clicks to find information. It's great for putting everything current students need in one place.

However, when it comes to thinking about recruiting and attracting new students, you've got to think about the user experience. Think about device access and why you can find things so easily on Amazon. So what we'd like for you to kind of think through tactically is maybe optimizing your website for recruitment, and we can do that by creating just a simple landing page or a micro-site which is just several pages that drives people, specifically new people, to find out information about your school and how to register and the value propositions. What is it going to do emotionally for them to change their lives?

So here is an example of a recruitment micro-site that we did for 14 community colleges in Central Mother Lode, and it was called the Find It Be It campaign. You can do it. We can help, college your way, close to home. All of those were key messages that were very important. But in this one, you find it's two to three clicks to find information, and it's divided by users. Larger, images, easy to read text, organized information, and it's optimized for mobile.

Just think about that. Most, even the vulnerable populations, usually will have some kind of mobile phone, right? So how do you optimize everything for mobile? And you can see here this has a contact button, and we're going to talk a lot today about generating leads. In this particular one, this little contact form, we fill out the name and go to a certain school within the region, but do you have a place where you're capturing contact information?

So we want to kind of think through this concept. Marianne, what would you like to talk about here for high school students? Because we took that campaign, and we're doing it now with Strong Workforce program for Kern County only, that same kind of career education, which is part of the region. Talk a little bit about this and what we're doing here.

Yes. This was really a K-14 program, and I know that a lot of you are interested in pathways of bringing people from the adult schools and putting them on a pathway to your community college partners or partnering with various different schools. And so what we did here is this is a five page website that tells everything students need to know. It has the various programs that they can get into when you click, and you can see it tells you what schools offer what programs, and it tells them where they can finish up.

So we're showing the complete connection and making that connection in their minds of, oh, I start here, and this is where I can go to finish, and then these are the types of jobs that I can get. So the whole program is set to get people to see that there's an end point, and they can do it. That's what I wanted to say.

Good. I love it. I love it. Very simple. So think about that. And here's a little kind of screenshot of the video playing of how they do it. They find the school in this particular instance, and then they click it, and then they roll through it. So think about simplifying your website. Even if you don't want to build a two or three page micro-site, one landing page, right, that can really help them understand and connect the dots for them. Oftentimes, we don't connect the dots for students. We'll just say, hey, here are these different kind of classes here and without connecting the dots on how to do it. OK.

The next thing that we want you to think about when you're building out that one page, how can you tell your audience, your students, that, hey, you are open for business. Your doors aren't open, but your virtual doors are. And so we're doing a lot with this where we've done bounce-back campaigns. So this one was for the Workforce Board in Contra Costa County, and it's kind of like a positive-- I wouldn't say positive spin on COVID, but the message is that we're here to help you, and we've got a hashtag, BounceBackCampaign. Your virtual bounce back team of workforce experts.

And you can have a section on there for motivating students, how do they go through the recruitment process, just information that will really help them. So, Marianne, anything else in the chat box that-- you're typing away. I see. Any questions that are coming up on this section? But the message here is streamline, one, two clicks. Boom. They're there.

Yeah. That was the question. And the optimal-- and they call it shopping cart abandonment because it comes from the studies done by Amazon and some of the big online shoppers is three clicks. That's your maximum to get anywhere, and you can see, if it takes more than three clicks, it's not information that they need to have. And what we've seen--

Somebody mentioned we did the OCC career education website a few years ago, and there was mountains of information. I mean, just mountains of information to put on there, but we streamlined it in such a way that you still only took three clicks to get to any information you need. And that's just a matter really thinking it through and putting it together in a thoughtful way, putting your Amazon hat on.

What is OCC?

I'm sorry. Orange Coast College

[chuckling]

Sorry. Sorry. That's why somebody-- it was a Valerie, I think. She referred to it as OCC in the chat box.

OK, good.

So I was on that role.

So that's something you guys can do right away, right? Think about how you can positively frame COVID, which we're going to get into in the messaging. And I know that sounds so weird. How do we positively frame it? But you possibly frame it through your messaging, which we're going to get into now, on your students' ability to succeed. Right now, very emotional time for your students, for all of us, right?

And so they have fears, right, around what they can and cannot do. And Marianne, you're a pro at this. I know. We're speaking to the choir here, but go ahead and share that the next two sides on the importance of emotional messaging.

Yes. And again, that's extremely important in this particular time period because I think we're all stressed, but what we try to do is always go back and think about the three things that we know from years and years and years of research of what makes someone enroll in adult education. These are specific to adult education, incidentally.

Goals, having specific goals. And a lot of times, those might be, I want to be able to help my son with his homework. I want to be able to speak English well enough to read stories to my grandchildren. I want to set a role model for my kids. I want to have a life that I'm not always worried about money.

So these goals, not I want to be an x fill in the blank, more personal goals, and then the belief in success. And again, we've been saying this for years. You all know this, but what does the belief in success mean in an online world? It means I want to believe that I do have digital literacy. I want to believe that I can do this. And then, as we talked about earlier, see a clear pathway. Where does this end? What kind of job am I going to get where I'm not going to be laid off?

So these are some of the things that we hear people saying. I know I'll get frustrated trying to learn online. I'm not going to even try. When would I be able to study? The kids aren't in school. I'm working. I don't know how long I'm going to have a job. I can't think about going to school now. I'm worried about my job, my health, my family, and what difference will it make going back to school? I see people with really good jobs getting laid off.

And I want to say, those last two things tend to be on the male side to a large extent, and we are seeing a definite much bigger drop in enrollment of men than we are women. So just something to-- this may be contributing to that.

Mm-hm. And that kind of leads into the next election, right?

Yes, the importance of emotional messaging. And so this is what we're talking about in terms of why this is important to think about. I know a lot of you are really saying, how do we reach people? How do we reach people? But if we give you answers on how to reach people but you're not reaching with the right message, it's kind of spinning your wheels. So we want to make sure today we're telling you. We're kind of giving you tips about those things, how to reach people but then what to say once you get there.

Yeah, definitely. And actually, Marianne, we put together this article that's in your package, which Marianne is going to get into, which is the power of personas, and Marianne, if you could go just a little bit into what is a persona, and then maybe give them an-- I think we have an Orange coast. college example, and then maybe instructions on helping them to do that.

OK. Let me-- give me just a second there. I was getting the link to put in the chat box.

Oh, cool. OK.

[laughing]

Yes. OK. Personas are fictional characters that are created to help you get into the mind of your students or your potential students. And yeah, you know them. You talk to them every day. Of course you know them. But when we develop a persona, what it allows us to do is then look at that and test every message we want to say to someone. So we create personas, which are imaginary people, that represent a student, a type of student at our school.

OK.

And this example from Orange Coast College is Lea, and Lea's family owns a small restaurant. It's hard work, and her parents expect her to work hard, too. She graduated high school first in her class. Her parents' plan is for her to attend community college for two years then transfer to UCLA, but Lea is interested in art and doesn't see the point of a four-year degree.

The brand message of Orange Coast College resonates with Lea because she sees a way to follow her interests and make her parents happy. And the message that we used at Orange Coast College is the smart choice because it's something that appeals to both her and her parents. So this is an example, not a real person, but someone that we looked at and said, this is the typical type of person that we want to target and that would be a good fit for our school.

And Marianne, why do we go through this exercise? We're building these personas, and you mentioned that for OCC, kind of revamping their particular career education platform. One of the key messages that we put out there was the smart choice, right? So why do we do that? I mean, why is that so important, and how do we get to reach that conclusion that the smart choice was a good, indeed, message for that particular area in Orange County?

Well, this is something that's really important to us. Every client we have is different, and every client has a different target. So for Orange Coast College, it's a highly educated area. This is down in Costa Mesa Irvine, Southern California area, very highly educated. It is an area that has-- I'm sorry. It's a college that has a big transfer rate, a lot of people go swimming, very Asian community, also a Hispanic community on parts of it.

But we looked and said, what is important in that highly educated community when we have the opportunity for people like Lea who really probably isn't a good fit for UCLA? How can we show her parents that Orange Coast College is a much better fit with their fashion and their art programs yet let her parents know that this is a smart choice for her? So this was a message we had to develop for both the student and for the parent.

That's great.

Very different than other areas.

Yeah. That's great. And you'll see later in our examples-- and a lot of people putting in the chat box saying, well, gosh how would I be able to build a micro-site off my district platform and things like that? The idea here is, and what we're building towards, the case studies, is you'll see that we will show you several case studies in different areas that have different messages that are going to resonate with your adult learners and prospective students, right?

And then you can create a campaign website for them. And so that's the idea that we're building here towards. Now, Marianne, here's a good question from Adriana. What's the difference between success stories and fictional personas? That's a great question, Adriana.

They have different purposes, really. A success story is a purpose to say, you can end up over here. We really see success stories that say, I am in my third week of class, and I'm actually able to do this. I'm able to do this in this class. I can succeed. That's where the success, that's where the pain point is. Recruiting is about getting people in the door, not necessarily on the success story.

You're saying this is the end years from now, three years from now, a long time from now, being able to connect them both at the micro level of, yes, you can get in the door, and you could succeed here every day. That's a little less scary, really.

Yes.

It's the baby step approach.

Definitely, definitely. Now, Dana asks a good question, too, about, for the campaign, do you look at consortium level? Site level? Both? So we're going to share some examples with you because we'll guarantee you that the consortia sites that we have looked at are very much geared towards meeting minutes, and here are our members, and maybe a link out to the schools, but it's very much separated.

We're going to talk about the power of a regional plan and what you can do, or even at a single site level. So just bear with us there, and we'll get into some of these examples here on different ways that you guys could approach it based on what your needs are.

So, OK, Marianne, Here we go. So we're going to put them on a homework assignment, right?

Yes.

Even though we might never see them again, this is your homework.

[laughing]

Yes. OK. So if you're looking at developing your own persona, let's think about what your students are like. So this is something that you can take, and I put a link to it in the chat somewhere along here, but these are the questions you ask. Sit down and say, OK, this is my exercise. I'm going to think of one person in my school who I think is a pretty typical student.

Answer these questions. What worries the student the most? Unemployment, health concerns, bills, child care. And the trick here is don't try to answer for anybody. Answer for one person. Answer, how much has the current crisis impacted their day to day lives? Do they have stable housing? A job? And then the third thing is, how do they see online learning? Is it for and beyond them? Not like YouTube, but maybe they could try, or helping their kids has been so frustrating. They can't see doing it themselves.

That's a big one. If they're seeing so much trouble with their kids with Zoom, particularly if they had kids going online in the spring, which was kind of a nightmare, as we all know, of us all, within three days, learning a brand new language, as it were. They're going to come in with a mindset of this is scary and impossible and doesn't work very well, and we need to be able to change that, and what we say to them is important. So it's good to get this down when you're creating personas so you remember that when you get up to the point of developing things to talk to them.

Oh, I love that, Marianne because, again, this is your foundational piece, everybody, for getting to your right message. And you're going to see in the case studies, you're going to need that, right? You are going to need to have that right message. So let's put a pin in that, and just know that your homework assignment, and now we're going to move on to considering new tactics.

And what I'd like for you to do while Marianne is playing around in the chat box, I see her typing furiously, is what types of outreach have played the biggest role for your school in the past. So think through kind of what you've done in the past. It's like, gosh, this is kind of our bread and butter here we go out. Maybe it's a schedule like-- yeah, Rene is saying paper schedules, those kind of things.

And then also, how has that changed with COVID? How has it changed? Or maybe it hasn't changed. So as we're working through this next section, I'd love to hear from you all about the types of things. Word of mouth, Audrey is saying, that's still kind of a big one. Marianne, kind of take us through this section on reaching students now in the COVID era and what we need to think about.

Sure, and a lot of you have social media. And I will say that you have-- and you've rightly figured out that even at the very lowest income levels, we're close to 70% of people are online in social media. So yes, there is social media. It's available. It's a good tool for you.

OK.

But reaching students on TV is not as important. As you can see, this black line here, all three is going down. In the African-American community, a lot less TV watching, semi-stable but still not very high, less than three hours watching in Hispanic and white communities, sorry about that stumble, and very low in the Asian community television watching.

So even though we know, in Hispanic communities, the telenovelas and the Spanish language TV is important, so that would be the one caveat, I would say. Spanish language to reach a very specific ESL student or a parent influencer or an influencer of an English-dominant student.

So OTT, as I said, really talks about really streaming. Video on demand, Netflix, Pandora, messaging, WhatsApp, Facebook. Twitch is a new one that is out there that is really good if you're looking for a younger male audience. It goes on and on. But one of the things we say about social media is don't depend on Twitter, Facebook. That's not necessarily where it's going to be for you. Focus on the channels that make most sense for your audience.

Discord, Marianne. Valerie had a question. What is Discord?

OK. Discord is a social media channel that was started by gamers but has actually really become a huge channel now for college students and high school students where they can have almost 24 hour study group, I will say. So that is one. There are a lot of very, very tightly organized channels. Discord and Twitch, I'm going to just tell you those to think about or look up. If you have very specific audiences, they're both very good for, as is YouTube, for being able to hone in on exactly who you're looking for.

Excellent. So that gives you kind of like an-- and Mindy, I think it was Mindy, was saying they were mailing brochures to home, but the uncertainty of class delivery methods, is it going to be all virtual, is it going to be a hybrid, it makes it difficult to print. It's very fluid environment, very fluid with COVID. Things change sometimes by the hour and the minute, which is why we're recommending that you set up these online virtual tools and strategies which we're going to move into now in the case studies for you to think about.

And when we do this, it's not necessarily you have to do each one of these, but we want to share with you the strategy of why things were done within different regions. Some of you have put in the box, gosh, it seems like we're all disjointed within our own district. It would be good to pull resources. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. We did a whole session yesterday with three panelists who have done that in different areas. We're going to touch on some of their campaigns today and go a little bit deeper as well.

So on this particular one case study, we've got a recruitment site, emotional messaging and story, sticky, contact forms and lead automation, and virtual pathway guidance. Those are all the things we're going to cover. Penny is asking the cost. We'll get into that, and some of-- I think we've got some data points, Marianne, on cost per school on some of these campaigns, which is very much lower than, of course, if you went out and did it on your own.

And of course, asking the cost for a campaign is like building a house. Do you want to advertise it? Do you want one landing page? How many pages are going to be on your site? And also, you want to look at what internal resources you have. Maybe you have web developers as part of your team. Maybe you just need help with the strategy piece. So it's very customized. It's difficult to say, but we'll go to and talk about costs in each of these campaigns.

The case study one is the Central Mother Lode Regional Consortium. This is in Central Mother Lode here in California. This particular campaign crossed 14 community colleges who said we need to elevate around the value of career education and generate leads because our enrollments are down. Sound familiar? So Marianne, any particular area or other things you want to talk about in this particular region that we found and just in the research piece and kind of their personas?

Yes. It is a very different. This was a very different area than the one we do for Orange Coast College. This was the Central Valley. We did research on here. We found that one of the things that was interesting that came out of this was that the number one driver for students in this area was that they wanted to stay close to home, and so our goal here was to basically say, you can get a good job but stay in your community.

You can continue to be a part of your community. You could stay with your family, and look at this opportunity here to go to college. You don't have to go to UC Merced. You don't have to go away to LA or San Francisco to go to college. You can go to college right here, and so that was the message that came right through all the time. And we did how many videos? A whole bunch of videos.

We've done a lot of videos. Here's the persona from those particular student, too, in this area.

Yeah. This was Rosa, and Rosa was the oldest child of arg-- argri-- agricultural workers. Wow, had a problem with that, but Rosa did very well in high school, but she didn't really know anyone who had a degree or had any post-secondary education. And so she was a good student who could go to a four year college but that'd be too far from her family and the life she knows.

So for Rosa, we developed this persona of somebody that we picked out from the area. We looked and said, what would be the thing that we could say to her that would explain to her why she should be going to one of the community colleges here? And the answer was let's tell her. Rosa, you can get a degree. You can get a good job. And guess what? You can stay home.

That was it, very simple message, and that's what we told her. Because as educators, we know that one of the most important things, particularly in the adult education world, is that personal contact. And you're going to see that on some of the case studies we do about how important it was that we say a message that says this is possible and then immediately make a connection to showing how they can do that by connecting them with a real life person.

Right. And that message is the message that goes on your one landing page or two landing pages or your section of your website that you're pushing people to. So on this particular, we had the brand promise. Because when you create a campaign like this, a recruitment campaign for students, what is your promise to them? And it must be emotional. Again, when we go on a lot of your websites and we take a look at it, it's very kind of here are the meeting minutes.

If you're in a consortia website, here's your meeting minutes. Here are our members. Here's our schedule of meetings, or a district website has a lot of different information that someone's trying to wade through. Even if you put up just one page and just push people to that page-- so for example, the Find It Be It campaign, we purchased the URL finditbeit.org.

And so in our advertising and when we talked with students, the message was the brand promise to them. That emotional message was good jobs was close to home. That was important for them. That was part of the campaign. And so you could redirect someone on your website. Your webmaster knows how to do this. If you purchased, say, finditbeit.org, that was going to be your website, they would redirect people to that one landing page so that the visitor doesn't have to go through all of the different pages to find what is important, what that emotional message is.

Oftentimes, again, we have logistical information and all that. We got to get to the emotion in the heart. That's what a recruitment campaign is all about. So each area is going to be very different in your school, perhaps different region, et cetera, in terms of what drives those students. So building the personas is a way to get to the right message.

Now, in this particular campaign. This was with Strong Workforce program dollars for this particular region, and they wanted to do a ton of videos. Oddly enough, when our team went out and found students and we wanted to interview them, guess what? They wanted to find a job closer to home, and they had their different stories that they could tell. So we're going to show you how this emotional messages connected during video.