Celina Shands: Morning session. And so thank you for re-joining us. So let's get this all set up and ready to go. I did pop a link in the PowerPoint-- or in the PowerPoint, in the chat box, so you can download the PDF version of the PowerPoint and follow along with us.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Celina Shands. I'm the CEO and founder of Full Capacity Marketing. We have been in the market almost 20 years and have helped more than 500 workforce and education organizations. We're really known for our campaigns and marketing and communications expertise and workforce and education.

And I'm joined here today by my colleague Maryanne Conlin, who's the vice president of marketing and communications. And she's going to be really in that chat room today, just following along and so will I too. So just make sure you use the chat box. If you have any questions whatsoever, pop them in there. Any comments, that type of thing.

Some of the topics we're going to cover today is how the pandemic environment has increased the need for strategic messaging. We get bombarded every day with messages, so many of them. And so how do you cut through that noise and especially, with your recruitment of adult learners?

We're going to talk about this concept of personas and using that as a strategy for cultivating and developing the correct outreach message, whether that's on a flyer, social media posts, or in a campaign. And along the way, we'll give you some examples in case studies. We're also going to leave you with a roadmap for replication. So all of that in your handouts, so make sure you download that handout.

And the other thing, we just started in the chat. If you want to tell us where you're from, your school, and also what are the key adult learner recruitment challenges that you're currently facing? If you could let us know that, that'll help us tailor the information. So with that, let's kind of jump right into it because we've got a lot to cover in a short amount of time.

This is from a study, some key findings from a mathematical study, from outreach to enrollment strategies to engage adult learners in education beyond high school. It is pretty interesting there were three key kind of takeaways. The first was about targeted messaging.

And you can probably relate to this finding that says, adult learners often have priorities that differ from those of students enrolling in higher education programs directly after high school, such as family and work related responsibilities, thus it's important to use targeted messaging that recognize these competing demands. And that's what we're really going to focus in on today. What is an effective message?

Also they mentioned high-touch approaches. Adult learners often need more high-touch approaches, such as the support of navigators to guide them through the enrollment and financial aid process. We find that in marketing and communications, it takes anywhere from 5 to 12 strategic touchpoints to get a student to enroll.

What is a touchpoint? That can be, they see an ad, they see a flyer, there maybe they've visited your website, or a counselor. So just think about that. It takes between 5 and 12 strategic touchpoints. That's a lot. And we tend to find it even higher with adult learners between 8 and 12 and the higher range.

And then online tools. Online tools can help engage prospective adults and make enrollment convenient and efficient. But again, they're also balancing out work and family demands. Maryanne, you've done a lot of looking at research. Anything else you want to add to this slide just in terms of our current environment with COVID? Oh, and you're on mute, Maryanne.

Maryanne Conlin: That makes it harder. One of the things I did want to touch on is just this is a high information purchase. When adults consider going back to school-- we give an example in marketing. They teach you the difference between a high information and low information. A candy bar is a low information purchase. You see it in a store, you grab it, you put it in the checkout counter.

Education is a high information. It's not a snap decision, it's not an impulse purchase. So this really leads into the 5 to 12 times is the reason that much is needed because it's like buying a car. You don't walk into the lot and say, OK, I'll take that one.

You spend some time and you research what is the gas mileage? What is the performance on this? Is it easy-- in this day and age, is it easy to get parts for it? So this type of information is what has to be given to an adult learner kind of step by step. Here's a little bit, here's a little bit more. And you'll see as we talk about it, why it's important to understand how that works, and what you need to say at each stage of the enrollment journey.

Celina Shands: Right. And you may be saying, well, our classes are free, right. But there is an investment in their time and their energy plus juggling all their issues. So it's a decision point that they have to make. And it's a high information one as well.

Maryanne, we've got a couple of folks in the chat that are putting in their key challenge points, so make sure you take a look at that too. But all that to say it really, really means that you've got to focus in on the right message. You could spend all your time and energy on social media or advertising campaigns. But we have a saying here at Full Capacity Marketing that is, you miss the message and you missed the mark. So it's really important to break through the noise, as we say, and there's a lot of noise out there.

If you look at this, how many ads did we see daily in 2020 during the pandemic? It was between 6 and 10,000 depending on what type of market you're in. But you consider television, radio, internet pop up ads, all of that. 6,000 to 10,000 a day. That means you're adult learners are seeing those many just as you are.

And so we're having to cut through a lot of noise that is in the market to say, hey, here we are. Adult education is great. Come and enroll in our classes. On top of all the things, the pandemic has brought all the challenges. And so how we break through that noise is through what we call emotional messaging.

Now, research shows that purchases or any kind of decision points as Maryanne was talking about is made by emotion. And so that is something we need to pay attention to in terms of creating emotional messages that will cut through and get the attention of our prospective adult students. Now, we do that through what we call psychographics.

And you have these psychographics queen on the session with you, and that is Maryanne And psychographics really have to do very simply with getting inside your consumer's head, if you will. So while demographics will tell us who we are serving, like their education levels, their race, their ethnicity, income levels, education levels, things of that nature. That is demographics.

Psychographics, really interesting. It gets more into well what is motivating my adult learner? What are their opinions, their attitudes, their values? And that's what we really wanted to do in this session is help you understand the concept of psychographics and how to create emotional messaging.

Now, we're going to teach you four steps today on how to create a good message, and we'll give you examples along the way. But the first is around psychographics. And I'm going to turn it over to Maryanne here in just a minute, and she's going to really dive into that.

What's in your mark is market segment's head? And when we say market segment, it could be, for example, your target audience is adult learners broadly. But the market segment may be someone specifically you're trying to target for ESL or someone that you're trying to target for career technical education, ABE, et cetera. So they're in their own slightly different, right. There's market segments.

The second thing you're going to understand that is you're going to create a fictional character, what we call a persona to represent different user types for your workforce and education services. So those are the corporate segments. And then from the persona, you're going to create a message strategy for the market segment you're trying to reach out to, and then use what we call a communication platform to develop the message.

Now, that may sound like a lot of steps, and it may be new for you all because a lot of times what we see when we go out to adult learner websites or do a communication audit, sorry, to adult learner providers, their websites and look at how they're communicating with a prospective adult learners, it's very features-based, very much like, hey, you're our classes, here's what time they start. That's good but for recruitment purposes, you really to break through that noise and really take a look at emotional messaging.

So, Maryanne, let's kind of break these steps down for them, and then give them a roadmap so they can replicate it. And we're going to start here with step one, which is getting inside the head of your market segment, psychographics, your favorite topic. [static] later.

Maryanne Conlin: I think what's interesting now is that in the past, you've probably done personas really kind of subconsciously. You've thought about who are your learners, who are the people that you're recruiting, who are the people that you want to have to come to your classes. And so working with them over the years, you've gotten to know them, you know what works, you know what words need to be said, and what motivates people. And we always talk about that.

And if you've been to some of our other sessions, we talked about the key things that motivate adult learners. The thing now is in the last year and a half, about every three months it seems, what people are thinking has changed. And that's what's so important now to really re-work those personas that you maybe figured out in your head and sit down and put it on paper because we haven't seen this before.

We see someone without a maybe without a high school diploma, why should I go back to school? There are plenty of jobs. Why would I go to school when I can get plenty of overtime? Really, it's hard to get someone to say, oh, you can get a better job, and they are going, well, I've got a better job. They just raised my wage $2 an hour.

Again, you have the junglers priorities. We've always had that in the past. We always know, as Celina mentioned, that adult learners have more to worry about than when is the next party that a recent high school graduate has. But now there's even more priorities. There's priorities around health, long COVID, about people still getting sick. There is about juggling more jobs or recovering from a financial situation that happened over the last 18 months. So there's more priorities juggling.

And then, again, on the financial side, there are people who came out of this with some serious financial issues that they really are looking at the overtime and the more hours that they're able to get and saying, I got to build up a financial cushion here. So take us thinking about the percentage of the people that you have been recruiting for years that you've been in this, their psychographics have changed. In fact, all of our psychographics have changed because of this pandemic. Next slide.

So one of the ways that we do this is through the personas. So personas are fictional generalized representations of the ideal job seeker or student. And these members of the target population are the ones that are most likely to enroll in their adult education.

So I know a number of you. I've see some names, I recognize that you've been to a workshop that we've done either today or at a prior conference, so you might a little bit-- have seen this before. But I just want to emphasize that when we do personas, we're looking at those most likely to enroll. You always want to go for the people who are most likely to enroll because these are the influencers.

These are the people who-- if you can get one of these people to enroll, then they tell their friends, then they tell their families, and then you get more people. So we don't try to get everyone to enroll. We really look at the people who are most likely to. And so when we show you these personas, what we're going to do is be looking at what is the psychographic makeup of those people most likely to enroll.

Celina Shands: And the reason we do that is because you all-- and we collectively do this. We don't have a lot of money to spend on advertising and outreach. You just don't have it in your budgets. So when you're looking at a defined amount, how are you going to spend it? You're going to spend it on attracting those that are likely to enroll in your program. You get more people to enroll, they're going to tell more people, et cetera.

Maryanne Conlin: All right. So let's go into some of the personas. So again, if any of you were at a previous workshop that we did for on personas, you may recognize Encarnacion. But we have updated her in the last year since we created her persona because her psychographics are different now.

So if you've seen this-- if you've been in one of our workshops on personas before, please, note that in the chat because we might call on you for some comments. OK. So Encarnacion, we're developing her first. So first we want to talk about who she is.

She's been able to work since you arrived in the US five years ago. First she works in the field, then she worked in local tienda. Encarnacion is smart, though she has limited schooling, but she's quick at managing the register draw. We see where she is quick. But she doesn't read well and speaks very little English. She really has had to.

Things were going well until the pandemic hit. She was saving money and thought she could soon get her own apartment. Those months of not working though hit her finances hard. Worse, when her daughter's school closed, she struggled to help her do classes on the Chromebook the school gave her. Now those schools open again, she feels like her daughter is behind. She wishes she could help her, but she has difficulty understanding the assignments.

And she's back at work now, but she's nervous about the virus. She recently got vaccinated at a pop-up clinic at her church, but a lot of people come into the store are not vaccinated, and she worries about getting sick. She lives with her prima and abuelita and another family. And it's great because she has helped with the kids.

She's thinking now about taking on another job helping one of the other ladies cleaning houses. So this is keeping her kind of in her community. But she still would like to improve her English, but she doesn't see the benefit when there's so much work available.

So I've outlined a few things on here, and you're going to see why I've highlighted those areas on the next slide. Oh, no, you're not. In two slides.

[interposing voices]

Celina Shands: I just wanted to interject really quickly that we've given you this kind of as how do you develop this? Like, how did Maryanne come up with that story? Right. So a lot of it is just sitting around, talking to your colleagues who interface with your students, you know your students, and think about a typical person that is interactive.

You can just give that person a fictitious name. We gave her a fictitious photo just to-- that's not a photo we would use necessarily in outreach materials, but it's just for our internal use on looking at personas and kind of brings her to life, if you will. And just think about what are their fears? What does he or she worried about? How much is the pandemic impact with their day-to-day lives? How did they see online learning?

So here's just a little questions, a guide, if you will, to help you start thinking about how to develop your own personas. And then this is a side you were looking for, Maryanne. I'll put all these up too so that you can go through them.

Maryanne Conlin: OK, thank you. There's my slide. All right, so what we've done is we've taken Encarnacion's story, which we had put up before, and you see the places that I've highlighted. And what we do is we match those to what we know are the success factors, particularly for ABE and English language learners, important things, strong efficacy belief.

And you all have seen this one before. Where you see-- where we have students who have not had academic success in the past. So they're coming in with a little bit of a feeling like, gee, can I do this? So when we look at messaging, we stop and we think, where is the efficacy? Where do they feel like they can accomplish things?

So we know that Encarnacion is smart and that she's quick at managing the register drawer. She's good at math. She hasn't had a lot of schooling, but she's good at it. So that's great, we know where her efficacy is. We look for her motivation.

So as you saw the last paragraph, she doesn't feel like she needs to learn English for her job, that's not her motivation. So a message to her that said, get a better job, learn English, would not be effective. But in the pandemic, she just realized how much her lack of English was holding back her ability to help her daughter in school. That's her robust motivation.

And so a lot of times you'll see, we often talk about job-related. And that's a real twist after the pandemic is it's kind of hard to say to people, hey, get a better-- I hear people say this, well, the pandemic is not going to last forever, so you should come to school. Yeah, well, I got a chance to make quite a few right now. So our get a better job message sometimes isn't working as well as it did in the past, but there are personal reasons that are definitely working now and this is one of them.

And the third thing we know is motivates-- oops, you stole my slide, there we go-- motivates adult learners is an understanding of the pathway. How do I get there? How do you connect this knowing more English to being able to help your daughter? So the message strategy that we have to do must address these three things. So we're thinking about a message strategy, we want to say-- making sure that we're touching on all these key parts of her psychographics.

Celina Shands: Right. And you know what's interesting, Maryanne, a lot of times what adult providers will tell us when they come in is what I thought we just talk about what we do for students. This is a different way, isn't it? A different lens. So what are we doing here, like, flipping the script here a bit?

Maryanne Conlin: Yeah. The flipping the script-- we really talk about saying features and benefits. We often tell people features. It's low cost or it's free or you can take it online or we have people to help you as opposed to saying, this is how you're going to reach your goal. So what we do for [inaudible], we're just flipping it to from the student perspective instead of from the school or program perspective.

Celina Shands: How sad. So now we get into-- OK, now that we know what we have to do, how do we apply it into what we call a communication platform? And the communication platform is really just thinking about her beliefs and everything Maryanne just talked about, and then shaping it up into three sections, if you will-- the persona's pain point, the call to action, which is your program solution, and the benefit to fit the persona. So the benefit is where we really want to focus in on.

So we created a message for this particular persona. It's just applying it and thinking about how we can encourage and engage her. So the first part is the pain point. And pain points sometimes are good. Like, if you [inaudible] this could go on a social media post, it could go on a flyer, it could even be in a campaign add method. So the pain point can be questions.

So do you feel like life keeps throwing curveballs? Yes, she does. Encarnacion does. Do you feel like you don't know where to turn to make things better or if you should even try? So that's getting me-- I grew up in the South and we had these things that we call dashboard dolls in our car where the little girl with a hula skirt or a baseball player in their head would go up and down. What you're trying to do here is get this persona to say, yes, that is how I feel. That's how I feel, right. So this is just one way of doing it.

Our program-- and this the next section is the benefit. Our program is for hard working people who speak little English. We can provide a pathway to a better job in life improving your English and helping you gain new skills for the post-COVID-19 world. Now, Maryanne, why would we put-- why do we put hard working in here? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Maryanne Conlin: Sure. There are things that every immigrant that has stepped foot in this country has had to be is hardworking to be successful. And that is very much true. Those of you who work with immigrant population know that they're hard working. And that is a self-efficacy belief.

That's something that a person who has a fourth grade education in their home country, they walk to a school, what are they going to resonate? What is going to make them feel familiar? Oh, it's we're hardworking people. I'm a hardworking people. I might not be a very academic person, I might not be very good at school, but I'm hardworking. So we really focus on that.

Celina Shands: Right. And then we say, there's a new way forward for you. So that's just addressing efficacy beliefs. And it could say that could be your tagline, could be a new way forward, right. Your organization name a new way forward.

And then the call to action could be something like, go to a newwayforward.com or text "help" to this number. So calls to action can be a text, it could direct persona to your website page that set up-- it just for this campaign. If you want to do just a campaign.

Then, Maryanne, anything else on this message here you-- hopefully, they've see now there's four steps. We got inside the personas head, we actually told her story and her pain points. We looked at what's the strategy now for this persona around promoting ESL, and then we've come up with a message using the communication platform, all of those four points.

Maryanne Conlin: Yes, and that's clearly are going to be key. And I'll just kind of mention that this was something that also did came out in work we did with Riverside. And Patricia's been talking a little bit in the chat about the work we did there and we ended up with a kind of a similar. We had focus forward Riverside was our tagline there.

So we were able to-- so that forward future, those types of words tend to be really resonate with people. And so when we take and we find something like that, what we do is we look at the personas and we look at pulling out the benefits as Celina went through, and then we look for a name, a tag line, a URL that's going to really appeal to them.

Celina Shands: Excellent. So before we jump into the camp to this persona case study, any questions in the chat, Maryanne? Are we good?

Maryanne Conlin: I think we're good.

Celina Shands: OK, so why don't you walk through this persona case study. And this was one we did for Mt. SAC for the School of Continuing Education, who had many different target audiences. So walk them through this strategy here.

Maryanne Conlin: Sure. So when Mt. SAC approached us, and like many of you today, we're seeing declining enrollment, which is quite a lot of people off guard obviously because during the last recession, we saw increasing enrollment, but Mt. SAC had really different audiences.

They had ABE students, which were ABE and they had a high school completion, they had an adults with disabilities program, they had older adults programs for seniors, they had short term vocational, and they had ESL. And so they were looking at these basically five different market segments. So we started to look for the commonalities between them.

So we're looking at ABE students finishing high school as well as short term vocational. In many ways, those people were definitely looking to take, get education to get a better job. We also looked and said, where are the commonalities between AWD and older adults and ABE?

Well, overcoming academic struggles many times for adults with disabilities and for ABE students, whereas with older adults and with ESL, we did have some people looking for a better job. But we also had a lot of people, particularly in the English one, two, and three, the early days, just looking to be able to navigate life more, to enjoy life more.

So it wasn't necessarily so much job-based. Though at the higher levels of English, it would be more job-based. So this is an exercise we did in commonalities because to find a message that can resonate across all these different target markets, we needed to come up with something that would work. And so this is the first step in the process.

Celina Shands: Right. I mean, those four different target markets were represented in the division school of continuing education and they wanted to instead of one division going off and doing a campaign and the other one and the other one, we wanted to do one campaign where we could segment different messages for these target audiences.

But what message would resonate across all of them so we could go out and the moneys would be used effectively? So this is why we did this exercise trying to find the commonalities. Anything on this, Maryanne, and higher consequence of failure, lower consequence of failure?

Maryanne Conlin: Oh, yeah. And to-- OK, so-- well, this was something that was interesting that we really wanted to look at is saying, if you have a high consequence of failure-- so you have a couple of different things. You have ABE students, you have short term folks, so you may have some concern here about their ability to be successful in the programs that has to be addressed because they're going to care more about it because there's higher consequences of failure.

And on the other hand of that, you do have the ability to be able to encourage more, encourage them because it is a high cost of failure. So your retention strategies can really be around the ability to actually have a pretty great success. Whereas on the other side, with a lower consequence of failure-- I'm sure a lot of you have seen that who offers senior programs-- there is a lower consequence of failure. If you don't go to the class, then it's not like you're not getting a degree.

Longer term, there are consequences as we know with mental and physical health. But in the short term, things like concern about the virus could really hold people back. And the same with ESL. If you're looking at ESL to enjoy life more, then the consequences of failure are not super high, they are-- but you can do it some other time.

So again, this all feeds into the messaging strategy because, as Celina was talking about, looking first for a focus that will appeal to all of these groups but then as we get into the advertising part of it, we break it down and we speak specifically to the need. So you kind of need an overall strategy, and then you get into the pieces of it. But we can move on to the next slide. Here we go.

So what we do-- what I just described is a market segmentation strategy. So we look at the student demographic profile. And so we saw that we had the target students for ABE and STV, we found have had fewer academic support resources in high school and less information from family and friends about post-secondary options. And we know that that's who we tend to see is the people who had less of either family or school support.

But the STV students could also be career changers. So these are particularly in the hard hit hospitality sector. So a lot of times you'll see people who have been in that sector and now it's not fun to be in the hospitality sector because everybody's crabby. So they're dealing with crabby people all the time. So we're seeing a lot of people trying to leave that sector and move into other sectors. So that's a great strategy for STV.

ESL students. It's been a rough few years with and under the old administration. So now they can be targeted more aggressively. There's less fear of interacting with government agencies, including schools.

And then post-pandemic, as I just mentioned before, with ADD and older adults, they may require additional time to adjust to the new normal. And one point on this and the AWD we really target the caregivers. And we found with Mt. SAC and with some of our other clients that offering on site for AWD has been very terribly appealing. SO we can move on to the next slide. There's just a lag, Celina.

Celina Shands: Yeah, it's a lag. I have the segment. It's psychographic profiles up.

Maryanne Conlin: OK, I'll have to start saying turn the slide in 1 minute in 30 seconds.

[laughter]

OK, so when we get into the student psychographic profile, what we knew right off the bat is a typical student had little information about what Mt. SAC had to offer. This is a community college that has an adult school. So the name Mt. SAC is very well known in the Southern California area that they serve as a community college and the adults was not as well then. So when we're look-- did we go back a slide? Oh, no, OK.

So we start looking, again, they have little information, and we may have career changes again. But the typical student is shaken by the pandemic. And they're going to question the value of taking a course in terms of time and money. So we're looking at opportunity cost here. People could be making money, so why should they go to school? So that's something that comes up a lot. Families did not feel control of their personal professional futures and students questioned their ability to succeed.

And then the four different departments have target students with different end goals, but a common goal of a better life. So that was what we saw which really bound everyone together. They were looking to get education to get a better life. So these are some of the personas that we did for Mt. SAC, and I'm not going to go over all of them. But you can see we did one for each segment. And we label them.

Marilyn was the social senior. So she was very social. She really did not like the pandemic was keeping her inside. We had Justin, an adult with disability, a motivated mover. He really enjoyed his study. He didn't understand why we couldn't do it during the pandemic. Adult basic education. We had Kim the late bloomer very typical, who is say 25 to 35 is going back now and reconsidering changing the decisions she made after high school.

We have Anthony the passion-driven learner. Anthony has been working at the Amazon warehouse for a long time but, hey, he thinks there's something better out there than he can do, so he's very interested in short term growth. And finally we have Lupe, for ESL, is a hopeful assimilate or wanting to assimilate, wanting to have a better life, wanting to be able to communicate better in her daily life. So these were the personas-- we can move on-- that we looked at.

And you can see here, we have the five different segments here, but what was the commonality? I'll live a better life. That's what they wanted. And that's what we saw with the common theme that would resonate with all of these populations. For different reasons, but this is really what their goal was to have a better life.

Celina Shands: And you'll see how that translated in the campaign as well. To me, this is the most important slide in the whole deck, Maryanne. This one here.

Maryanne Conlin: Oh, yeah. This is what we were talking about a little bit earlier. When we talked about SAC, we always ask our clients, can you please send us all of your materials? Can we have some of your flyers? Let's look at your website, we do a communications audit.

And what we found is that Mt. SAC was promoting convenient, flexible lower credit requirements just for you. We care, we are reachable, our colleagues are especially for you, we're welcoming. You're hearing the we're, we're. We are this, as opposed to what the student want is tell me something that will motivate me to build a better life. Make me believe in myself. I can do it. And show me how to get there.

So the benefit-based emotional message is close to twice as effective. It's an important statistic, twice as effective as rationale feature based messaging. So if you see this in your daily life, Nike doesn't sell shoes, they sell, you can do it.

Celina Shands: Exactly. So one of the homework assignments, if you so choose to do so out of this workshop, is to go into an audit of all of your touchscreen points, your website, your flyers, your catalogs. Are you mainly talking in features face, or are you talking in benefits? We're not saying features are bad for recruiting and working through those 6,000 to 10,000 messages that people are seeing every day, you got to have a theme, you've got to have a campaign, you've got to have an emotional message.

And so this is what we did for Mt. SAC, which was build a better life. High value learning. Low or no cost. And this is actually a landing page, just a single page, and we'll walk you through it because it represented all of their different divisions around that theme of build a better life. So no matter if I was ESL or career technical education or [audio out] student, it doesn't matter. I said, you know what? The commonality around all that is, yeah, I do want to build a better life. Tell me more. That's kind of the focus here.

So like, traditional school or program website where it shows like class schedules and here's everything you got to know about the program right now and what you have to do and how to enroll, it is really just emotional messaging with a contact form. The focus of a campaign like this is to get leads for the contact information of a prospective student who would be interested in it and you holding their hand and working through the enrollment funnel, right.

So on this particular, it's a one page website, and we've given you the URL there. It's buildabetterlifemtsac.com. And you'll see it. It has the contact form. And then I can select a way to build a better life. Select a Path. This is a dropdown menu here. And the choices would jump on the web page to wherever. If I picked Learn English, for example, then it would pull down to that module. And at the end of every module it, was Contact Us.

And you can see here we have the emotional messaging that doesn't talk about everything and what they're going to have to do. We're just saying how it's going to help them build a better life. And that is highly effective. And also you'll see two in each of the module or the demographics that resonate within the Mt. SAC population. So this is kind of like one module.

Another pathway was finish high school or brush up on your skills for college. That was the next one. Earn a certificate to get a better job, the next step in your career is just a few clicks away. And then they also had classes for seniors because you're better than ever. And then everyone can learn new skills, classes for adults with disabilities.

Maryanne Conlin: And you have-- if you go to that length that I put in the chat box, and I don't think that we may remember to tell the boss, but we have updated the website now. So there are videos on there, Celina.

Celina Shands: Oh, you did?

Maryanne Conlin: Yes, we did. We got the website updated. We did a number of videos for them. So when people are seeing this, everyone can learn new skills, classes for adults with disabilities, there's actually a little video that we shot that has a little interview, a little discussion, so that people-- drawing people in that they can see themselves. Hey, that person is just like me, and I can succeed here.

And then also on the map, we talked earlier about what motivates people or having a clear pathway and understanding and also the website is a pathway visual that we had that we're putting on the website. I think it's not quite up yet, but it probably will be it a day or so if you go back there.

Celina Shands: Yeah, it was really cool. One of the lady for ESL we interviewed her and she goes, my kid the other day told me, mom your English is so much better than when we moved to California. And it was just-- again, she's sharing her personal story about, wow, this. I was really struggling with this. This is what adult education did for me. And at the end of every video, which is just about a minute and a half, very short. If they just say build a better life at Mt. SAC. And so that becomes their campaign theme sort of throughout.

Now, Maryanne, we also did ads targeting these different segments. You want to just talk a little bit about that. And the ads.

Maryanne Conlin: Yeah. The ads work great here. One of the big pluses that we had is we did have-- we asked for a list of students who had attended the school in 2019 and then disappeared during the pandemic. And so we were able to load those names and contact information into the ad platforms. If you use the same email to sign up for Mt. SAC that you did to sign up for Facebook that we could target you directly.

So we were able to send ads out to people who had fit the profiles we developed, fit the personas, as well as people who were on the inactive student list, that was students that we knew attended there, we were able to take the information within something like Facebook or Instagram. As you probably know from listening to the news, they know a whole lot about you, a lot of psychographics.

So we're able to look at the psychographics in the platform of students who were current students or have been previous students at Mt. SAC, build ad campaigns to target people similar to them. And then on top of that, we were able to go reach out through email campaign to target them. So we're able to really build that whole ad campaign around personas.

And you could see these pictures here, the photos, again, very much targeting different groups. And you'll see the veteran on the right there we really look-- we would-- if we're targeting a veteran, they would receive an ad that showed a veteran. In part of the area, there's a heavy Chinese immigrant population. And then that we used people who look similar to the people who we were targeting and so on.

Celina Shands: So again, the visuals can be spot on but the message has really to be tied in and very tight with the whole campaign. And that's why you do all the steps we've shared with you early on before you even go out with any kind of outreach. And you can see how using personas for targeted messaging and outreach really-- it did this campaign did great.

They was about 439 over that a thousand impressions, people who are actually seeing the ad. 675 leads were generated from the ad campaign itself, and then what Maryanne was talking about earlier, targeting in on former students, reaching out to them, another 369. So there you have it over 1,000 or 1,044 leads for fall enrollment.

So this is the name of the game is lead generation to getting an enrollment and no longer-- I mean, I think, gone are the days where we just sent out mailers and catalogs. And it's just a general blanketed message to everybody talking about our classes and our features. It really has to think through who is it that I'm really trying to target? What's inside their head? And then let's get that message to where on platforms that they likely visit.

Maryanne Conlin: So with this campaign, we had to turn it off because what we do-- and we didn't-- I don't think we really touched on this-- is what we do is we have a real time delivering the leads to you when we run a campaign. So for Mt. SAC, we set up a Google document and Google spreadsheet, and we would put the leads into the spreadsheet and we created a number of column headers so that we used half of it, and then allowed them to use their follow-up, people to use the other half.

So they could go in as we were uploading, and they could go in and see the names. They would call them or they would assign them to certain people. They'd call, they'd email, they'd follow up because, again, that 5 to 12 touches. You really have to get to be able to follow up with people.

And we did have to turn off because-- we've had to do that a few times with campaigns because we just overwhelmed everyone. So, yeah. And so we're starting, I think, on the next one starts the 15th. I think they brought more people in to cover some of the leads.

[laughter]

Celina Shands: So I'm going to end the workshop on two things. I'm going to show you how you can replicate this in your area, and then I'm going to talk about a cost effective national campaign that we're doing that you can leverage at your local area, OK. So to get--

Again, the first thing I would really encourage every single person on this workshop to do is go and do a communications audit of all your touchpoints. What messages are you sending out to your students? Whether that's somebody picking up the phone or one-on-one, face-to-face, on a Zoom call, in a flyer, social media. And is it features-based or is it benefits-based? And who are you really trying to target? Because your message for ABE is maybe different than ESL, right.

So you've got different market segments, and those messages need to be somewhat segmented, kind of wrapped into an overarching campaign theme, if you will. So identify a specific market segment that you need to attract into your Adult Ed programs. That's step one. Where are your enrollments? Which classes are really low?

And then using the slide to the right as a guide, develop personas that reflect the story of a typical adult learner that you enroll in your programs. And that story needs to get inside their head. And think through what are their pain points that they are currently facing because you have a solution for that and it's clearly a benefit if they enroll in those programs.

And then using the communication platform, develop an emotional message that could be used at any point to recruit the market segment to your program. Just make that one shift and take a look at your messages.

So some of you ask about ad by budgets and all of that. Everybody has different budgets all over the place. But we created this national campaign called Move Ahead With Adult Ed! And we talked about it this morning in our 10 o'clock session, so you can go back and look up that session and play the recording if you like. But what this is a national campaign to increase awareness about what adult education is and the benefits for it.

You see the link there, which will take you to a Join the Movement page. And what you can do is you'll be able to do a lot of things there. One is to get your school on what we call the locator map. For moveaheadwithadulted.org is the campaign website. And you can get-- you can fill out a form there that says, get your school on the locator map.

And we're doing an ad campaign that's $120,000 ad campaign that Co-Aid is funding and we're managing for them. And is pushing people-- pushing adult learners to that locator map. So if you're on it, let's say they're interested in learning English and they put in your zip code, your school needs to come up so you can get that referral, right. So that's the first thing.