(DESCRIPTION)
Presentation. How a new social media strategy helped an adult school completely reinvent its approach to marketing. Video feed in upper right, Megan Shroy.

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MEGAN SHROY: Most people do. The difference is we don't know necessarily how we can use them for our benefit. And Drew those examples that you shared are still so funny to me because it's oftentimes the content that we're coming across. And that's why we have gotten so used to scrolling so fast because it's like who cares.

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Slide, South Bay Adult School recognized that it was time to leave their legacy print marketing in the past and evolve to a completely digital focus.

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And so when we met, Drew in South Bay Adult School Adult School, really, we weren't even talking about utilizing social media at first to drive enrollment, to build awareness. We were really talking about how to engage a community, how to engage our audience. What are best practices for South Bay Adult School and their audiences?

And that's really, really common when we first start talking to a client. Alongside that conversation, we were talking about the marketing spend that South Bay Adult School was currently putting in place in order to build awareness and drive enrollment. And as Drew mentioned, it was very traditional. It would spend a lot on print, printing course catalogs, direct to mail. What are some of the other things Drew that you mentioned that South Bay was doing?

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Text, Drew Gamet.

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DREW GAMET: I mean, so traditionally just because a lot of this is connected to the community, our particular community, we have two weekly newspapers. Information was going out there. And stuff was being sent home based on datasets from addresses. We never really-- it's hard to really get a clear idea of necessarily who those are going after. And once you send something out, it's gone.

MEGAN SHROY: Exactly. And you know what, there's something to be said. There's a purpose for all of those tactics. And when used correctly, they all can be effective. When used in tandem, they can be really effective. Where we came in and began to have a conversation, Drew and I, it was around, how can we measure what we're doing?

How can we track our audiences journey? How can we really learn from what we're doing from a marketing perspective to really show ROI and help us make informed decisions in the future about how we're building awareness and driving enrollments? So what we decided is to implement a strategy that really pulled back on a lot of that marketing spend and put a portion of it towards paid inorganic social media marketing.

And Drew can attest. This was a big job. And it took some handholding. It took a little bit of patient communication to get all of our internal stakeholders on board with pulling a spend, a big spend, that we have been doing for a long time in printing and direct mail and traditional advertising, and shifting those dollars to an untested strategy.

And so really, the way that we tee that up to our stakeholders is by talking about how hyper local organic social media marketing can be measured every step of the way. And while it is a-- while it is a spend just like traditional advertising or printing a course catalog is a spend, it's one that we can measure and it's one that is a fraction of the price.

And Drew if you click back, I believe the stat is by shifting this budget, we actually ended up saving marketing dollars in the shift. I believe that we cut expenses by 15%. And that's because the nature of print and advertising is-- it's expensive. It's expensive to print and it's expensive to mail. And of all of the forms of advertising, social media advertising is by far the cheapest.

And that's because we're only going to pay for the eyeballs that we want. And we're only going to pay for the audiences that we're trying to target. So when approach came in, we really started by developing a comprehensive social media strategy. And that all starts with an audit. That's where we're able to go in and kind of peek behind the curtain of any client's Facebook page to look at a couple of things.

We look at, who's following us right now? Who is engaging with our current content? And what audiences do we have the potential to reach if we were to implement an advertising campaign? And the way that Facebook's Ads Manager works is very, very sophisticated in that we can target not just by location-- folks that are in the whatever mile radius around our school, but certain demographics.

We can target by language. We can target by interests. We can slice and dice an audience in a lot of different ways.

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Slide, Approach continues to manage all social medial marketing tactics for S.B.A.S. and, dating back to Jan 2020, the school continues to surpass all previous enrollment averages while student interest brand awareness is at an all time high.

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And so we took a look at that. And what we did is we put together a social media strategy that really allocated advertising dollars towards building that community online, towards reaching that audience.

And what that looks like is month-over-month we're running ads every single week talking about the unique value proposition of South Bay Adult School to those audiences. And if you look here along the right side of the slide, you're going to see some metrics. We got 2,000 new Facebook fans, 2,000 post shares, over 2,000 Facebook comments.

What these are showing you is one, we're growing our community, but we're really growing engagement. And that's the key metric that you want to look at, that 185, 275, that's the amount of people in our target audience-- folks that are potential students of ours that are engaging with our content month in and month out.

And really, what that resulted to is just under 50,000 links to our website and our class registration pages. So one of the big metrics that we always look at is how we're ranking against our competitors. And so, of course, in this case, we're looking at all Los Angeles area adult and community education schools.

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Slide, Social Media Results, Facebook, Local Competition. Two rankings.

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When we started this campaign, we were ranked ninth for overall awareness. Now, month-over-month, we're ranked first. And that's for all key Facebook categories during the last 18 months. So this is an ongoing effort. It's something that we are striving to achieve every single month.

And I really want to emphasize-- yes, this is driving a bigger community online. Yes, this is a direct channel to have conversation with our audiences on social media. But two, it's the driver of registrations. And it's one that we can measure every single step of the way from when they first engage with our post on Facebook to then clicking through onto our website.

And so this is the big metric. Drew, do you want to add in here?

DREW GAMET:

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Slide, Social Media Multiple Data Sources.

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Well, and it's funny because coming from our side of the house in terms of adult education and just education in general, one of our main tasks as administrator is really using data to make sure and validate that what is going on is actually going on with our students. That goes with student performance, but it also goes with really identifying and making sure that whatever activities we're doing are valid and are having an actual end result.

The reality is that if you take the data that comes out of Facebook, all these data metrics that Megan was talking about, and you use TOPSpro Enterprise, and you're looking at your own data, how many people are registering for classes. When are they registering for classes? Is there a correlation between the two? Is there a correlation between the demographics between who is signing up for classes?

And probably, one of the most important little things that social media does is that rather than us being responsible-- because in our particular case, we have a lot that-- we have a very diverse student population. So we have students that speak Spanish, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Urdu, Pashto, all these different languages.

And one of the cool little features of social media is if someone sets up a primary language and one of their accounts as many of our students do, it doesn't matter what language the message goes out and they're going to get it auto-translated for them. So we're already taking a huge step and making sure we're connecting with our students.

And where that leads is to community.

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Slide, Social Media Creating Community. Facebook comments.

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It's not just that we get students who come on and say nice things. That's great. It's great to have testimonials for students. But if you look at some of these posts that are there, the students are so engaged. At times, they're answering their own questions.

And they're being as they should be. They're the ones who are validating what's going on when we're saying that there's this facet or that the classes are free or whatnot. And they and they're talking back and forth with each other. And that's and that's really huge. Did you have something you wanted to add onto that as well, Megan?

MEGAN SHROY: No, I just think what you said is such a proof point in building community on social media. Because if you invest in that community and you're actively growing your audience and you're answering their questions, you're going to see that then your community starts to back you too.

And that's really the best part. And you can see it right here on the slide. And you said it too. They're answering the questions for each other. They're doing your job for you. So by investing up front and building out that fan and follower base, they're going to help you in the long run manage this.

DREW GAMET: And the reality is that because this community spun up-- and luckily-- and very, very luckily-- I believe we were finally at the point where we're starting activities in December of 2019. We didn't know what was coming. But boy, we were very happy that we had because it was there.

And if you actually look at our spring 2019 enrollment compared to our spring 2021 enrollment, we actually grew by 13% in terms of our enrollment. I just don't see how that could have happened without having all of this going on.

MEGAN SHROY: Yeah. There's one distinction that I want to make too in what we're talking about. And just so we're all clear, those who are familiar with social media and those who aren't, this effort was both organic social media as well as paid social advertising. So yes, we're on and we're answering questions and we're engaging with our audience. That would be considered organic.

The paid social advertising is the audience-buying. And that's how we're able to grow our audience to create direct calls to action of going over and registering for classes, and how we're able to really grow the engagement. And we at Approach believe it has to be a combination of both.

Organic social media alone will not work in the same way. And that's because the only folks who are going to see that content are the ones that are already following you. And so it's really important to add that paid element to your social media marketing. Otherwise, you're only talking to people who are already following you, who already know who you are.

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Slide, Social Media Best Practices.

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Next, we really do want to talk about social media best practices. We just shared our story, and now we want to help you guys learn from that story. And so I have a couple of best practices that I thought might be helpful to share. The first is really understanding how folks hear about your school.

And

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Slide, Brand Awareness. Bar graph.

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before we started any social media marketing, we asked our current students how they heard about us. And we did this because we wanted to set a baseline for what we are doing. Again, we wanted this to be an informed test so that we know how to spend our marketing dollars moving forward.

And if you see here far in a way prior to starting social media marketing, it was by referral. Friends and family recommendations drove 75% of overall awareness. The traditional print marketing that we were doing was only 6%. So that's a big spend to see a 6% ROI. And I think it's really important to do this research up front to get baseline metrics and then to resurvey.

Because again, what works in 2020 may not work in 2021. And we've got to make sure we're constantly pulling our audience to understand how we invest our marketing dollars moving forward.

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Slide, Language Considerations. Bar graph.

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Another best practice, and Drew hit on this earlier, is language considerations. You can see here that English is not the primary language of the vast majority of students at a South Bay Adult School.

We always recommend a mix of translation tools. Facebook's built-in translator is a fantastic resource. And as Drew mentioned, you can speak to your students in whatever language is most approachable to them if they have their Facebook platform set up that way. That said, we also use Google Translate to answer questions in our student's native language and add subtitles to our online videos based on this kind of information that we have on languages spoken by our current students.

When you can meet your students where they are and make it as easy for them as possible, you are going to get higher levels of engagement. It is absolutely a practice that we recommend.

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Slide, Location Considerations. Bar graph, South Bay Adult School, Top Residence Cities.

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The next key learning was all about collecting real-time social data to inform our conversations and to really continue to monitor our student demographics, to help us refine our advertising reach.

When we first started working with South Bay, and Drew can probably add some more context here, we were really kind of looking at zip codes that we knew that our students lived in. And we were kind of relying on data sets in our system based on location. Well, we learned over the course of running our ads a lot more about the neighborhoods and the cities where our students were coming from.

And then every single month, we can tweak that audience that we're buying based on this data. And that is a key learning in social media, is it cannot be a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. There are tools like HubSpot-- there's a million of them where you can kind of set these advertising parameters up front and say, I'm going to put $1,000 behind this, and just let that money spend down.

To us that's a major red flag. We are going to watch out every single ad performs in real time, and we're going to adjust our spend accordingly. And we're going to say, oh gosh, we were targeting the wrong neighborhood here. This visual is not even resonating with this call to action. And so watching your ads in real time and learning from them to inform how you spend, not just the next month but the next week, is critical.

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Slide, Age Considerations. Bar graph, Age range of students.

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The other thing that we look at in addition to location is age range. And that's really important because different age groups have different behaviors on social media. They're on different platforms. And so while younger students prefer to get their information from Instagram and Twitter, older students spend most of their time on Facebook.

What's great about Facebook Ads Manager is we can buy eyes on all of those platforms. And so by understanding how old our students are-- and you can see in this case, the 40 to 59 kind of demographic is really our primary audience and informed keeping this advertising campaign on Facebook versus going on to some of these other channels.

But if we don't take age into consideration, we're not going to know that. Really, when executing any new special advertising campaign, we've got to first start with what's the appropriate platform. It's going to be the first question that we ask any client. And if I have a client who's targeting the under-18 demographic right now, we're talking about TikTok.

And we're talking about different types of social media than Facebook. And so while in South Bay's example, we rely on Facebook because that's where our audience is, when it comes to your school that might look a little different.

DREW GAMET: And the only thing I would add to that is-- going back to what is before, is certainly, there is still room for print when it comes to our older students, for sure. But just like there's varying degrees of what you can be doing in print, I think that's really kind of what you want to look at.

I mean, are you doing multi, glossy pages and whatnot, and then putting this huge spend to just a small percentage of your population. It's worth a conversation. That's definitely worth thinking. You can still do many print things and getting contact with those students, just being thoughtful about how much of that resource are you putting towards that, and how much are you putting towards where really the bulk of your students are coming from.

MEGAN SHROY: Absolutely.

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Slide, Student Goals. Bar graph, Attainable primary goal.

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The next best practice is student goals. And the key learning here is the more you know about what your students are trying to accomplish, the more thoughtful we can be when creating new classes and programs. And we learn about this by engaging with our audience online.

We target new students with very, very relevant social content. This is, again, back to this customized approach to advertising. One ad register at South Bay Adult School is not going to move the needle. If I am looking for English as a second language, I'm going to engage with a far different ad than if I'm trying to get my GED.

So we need to make sure that all of our posts, all of our ads are targeted towards the right audience based on their goal. And a good way of keeping this in mind is thinking through, what is that student's pain point? Why are they looking to invest? And let's address that pain point in the ad, in their native language, with the right call to action. And that's how we convert an audience, is by being very, very thoughtful about which content goes in front of which audiences.

DREW GAMET: And this is another prime example of why that information from your registration forms and the information that comes out of TOPSpro, it's important to have in mind and then to have this relationship so that you're using this data to target your potential students because-- again, not to use it as another opportunity lost. And I mean, that has a cost to it.

MEGAN SHROY: Yeah, absolutely.

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Slide, What are we doing? Slide, Examples of content we post. Three Facebook posts with images and videos.

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DREW GAMET: All right, so let's talk a little bit about some of the things that we're doing. I really can't overemphasize the importance of the message coming from the students. It's just absolutely incredible. And the stories that they can tell go farther-- so far beyond anything that we could come up with.

The struggle, the reality of what they're facing every single day. So to have them be willing to go out and say, yeah, I'll go on video. And it's not-- we're not talking about expensive shoots or anything like that. Pretty much everything that you see in terms of, for example, video or things that are the voices of the students, they're doing on there-- someone is doing on their cell phone.

We're just dumping it into a basic little editor, put a little intro in the front, and that's it. It's very simple. It's very easy to do. And students, when they're really enjoying the process, they really love that. We did do a very extensive a one-day photo shoot that was really, really helpful to catch a lot of these images of students.

And that was also really important and something that we were very glad that we got done in December of 2019 right before--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

MEGAN SHROY: I was just going to say I think that having quality imagery is one of the biggest tricks of the trade. And that's because you know when you're scrolling your mini-feed, you have microseconds to capture someone's attention. And the content that all audiences are used to now is higher level.

And so we always recommend starting with a professional photo shoot that's going to generate a library of photography that will last years. But we do really recommend investing in that one photo shoot. And then from there, yeah, that organic content shot on a cell phone goes a long way.

DREW GAMET: Your community has-- their ability to identify authenticity and inauthenticity is very, very good. So to just throw some stock photos in there, it's just never going to work, it's got to be everyone out there just sharing and sharing the world that you have to offer and telling your students why they should be there with you.

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Slide. A grid of Facebook videos.

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Here's some examples, some more examples of posts that we have. In this particular case, this is some of our different staff members. One of our big things when we opened for GED testing in summer of last year, right when we were in the middle of it, putting a video out, look, how safe everything is.

We do our career where constantly posting videos regarding our Career Pathways Program. Our Career Placement and Supporting coordinator, she is always out there with messages related to programs that she has access to so that students know that yes, you can get support with CalWORKS and other programs through our program.

In our particular case-- because our Career Pathways Program is a partnership between us and El Camino community college for all the career technical ed part-- having those community college professors there too to give their stories because even your teachers have their stories. And the students, especially in the shut down, loved, just like, oh, my gosh, I can see my teacher right there. It's absolutely great. But again, they're very simple to make. Just cell phone, record, and you're ready to go.

And then the other thing is that Approach can really support with making sure that the messages are really going out in a timely fashion. They can help with calendars. They can help with what types of content we should be-- it's always a partnership. And that partnership has just made a lot of our postings, when it comes to those types of things, really, really useful.

And you can look at just some of the numbers just on these posts individually in terms of how we're reaching out to members of our community. So it's really powerful to get that out in front of them. We've got student testimonials. We're constantly posting those as well. This testimonial down here on the left-hand side is from one of our students who came to us through WIOA III partner and we were able to get them into an internship. A lot of great stories like that.

With that, we've seen a couple of questions in the chat.

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Slide, Questions?

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MELINDA HOLT: Hey, Drew, I have those. I've been copying them and pasting them into a document. So if you'd like to read them, so you don't have to scroll up.

DREW GAMET: Sure.

MELINDA HOLT: OK, first one, from Kim Jones, "will the slides be available after the presentation?"

DREW GAMET: Yes, I think they're available for-- are they available for download through the app? Melinda, that's kind of--

MELINDA HOLT: They're not on the app yet. I'm not sure it can be made so. If it wasn't, could they get it from you directly?

DREW GAMET: For sure, for sure. If you wanted to just shoot me an email, I can put my email. And Megan, if you want to drop yours in the chat.

MEGAN SHROY: Yep, I will as well. Yes, I'll drop my email and can send that as well.

MELINDA HOLT: OK, next question from Audrey Dierdorff, SUHSD. "Do you teach digital literacy to teach students how to make accounts and how to navigate social media?"

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Text, Melinda Holt.

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DREW GAMET: So we do, as a part of our civics, we do do that. And we also, just as a part of our classes, just sometimes teachers will help students with posting. And they'll actually use that to go on and post some comments back and forth, just to get them to using the platform.

We found that the calendaring feature in there can also be pretty handy for them to make sure that they're getting important dates from the school, so they can-- so it's really about creating this opportunity for communicating. Sometimes it's going to be through the website. Sometimes it's going to be through the various social media platforms. It's whatever is most comfortable to them.

MELINDA HOLT: OK. "Do you have a dedicated social media person, or is it farmed out to staff?" This is from Leonard Moreno.

DREW GAMET: So in our particular case, we-- that's why we have the partnership with Approach. Megan, did you want to talk about some of this to support our program?

MEGAN SHROY: Yeah, absolutely. And I love how you worded your question about farming it out for staff because typically that's how someone starts with social media. And we find when we engage with a client, they usually say, oh, so and so is in charge of social media. They're the young one who gets it on our team.

And really, we recommend-- the way that social media advertising works has gotten very sophisticated. And so we have social media strategists on our team that are doing this day in and day out. They spend their entire workday within Facebook Ads Manager. So we're a contractor, a vendor of South Bay Adult School.

And we handle everything from the content creation, to the advertising buy, to responding to questions. So we really become an extension of your team to do that.

DREW GAMET: I would just say this. To get someone on staff that has that level of expertise, you would have to be a significantly larger program than us because of the complexity of what they're doing. It's just not possible to just have someone do it as an adjunct duty. You really need to know. It is a seasoned professional that we have working with us on that.

MEGAN SHROY: I appreciate you saying that. Oftentimes people have seen Facebook ads before. You might even see an ad buy or account before where you can put $5 behind a post and you kind of click who you want it to go to. We really take ad buying as a science. And there's probably 40 to 50 metrics that we layer into every single ad when it comes to buying your audience.

And the reason we do that is because we want every dollar to count. And there is no reason to pay for eyes to see one of your ads that it's not meaningful for. And that's how we're able to take a very modest advertising spend month over month and stretch it really far because we're only going to pay for the eyes that could possibly convert to students.

MELINDA HOLT: OK, the next question-- I'm actually going to do two questions. One, that just came up from Marianne. "What kind of budget allocation for marketing is needed to accomplish similar goals? Understanding it can vary, but how can I get an idea of what I would need to budget?"

And to piggyback on that from Anthony Meissner-- Misner, sorry-- "What is the cost for approach marketing?"

MEGAN SHROY: Yeah, Drew, I don't feel comfortable sharing your budget, so I'm going--

DREW GAMET: Thank you.

MEGAN SHROY: --to let you answer that question.

DREW GAMET: Yeah, well, I mean, that's kind of the tricky thing. I mean, it depends on the size of your institution. It depends on what you've been spending money on traditionally. I would say that when we started the conversation-- I mean, we were speaking frankly about it. Here's what we're spending. Here's what we're spending it on.

It seems like we could do better. And then we entered into the conversation. And like we said, it really ended up being a cost, a net cost savings at the end of the day. And really that's even almost too simple a way of saying it because then-- for example, we do a special event like a job fair or something like that.

Normally, you would go in and then maybe you're doing something special, so you're spending additional funds or maybe you're having to bring in some specialty expertise in order to get something like that off the ground. When the infrastructure is in place, then we can go and have a conversation like, hey, we want to do this. It's going to be special.

Can we get some special graphics or special things like that? And having the relationship, it just happened-- OK, we're going to do this. It's going to be outside of the scope, but we're going to add it in. But all the rest of the infrastructure's there already. So it makes it very easy to make those adjustments. So I don't know that you could-- so it's hard to nail down what the exact cost would be.

MEGAN SHROY: I appreciate you sharing that Drew. And the easiest way to answer that question is, it does vary on what we're trying to accomplish. And the easiest way for us to answer that is, reach out. We can have a conversation about your goals and objectives, and I can give you a budget range.

And typically, that's how we begin an engagement with any client. We have an informal conversation about what we're trying to accomplish. What those results look like. And then it's our job to provide a proposal that says this is how much this would cost.

MELINDA HOLT: OK. This is in relation to a slide that was up on examples of content we post, Drew. "Do you have permissions, releases for all photos?"

DREW GAMET: Yes, yes. Get those releases. And we do it double. We have that as a built-in question in our registration form. Do you consent to any images are in there? But typically, also for all of our special ones, like if a student is going to upload their story. Because a lot of times they're sharing a lot more personal information than what you would think of just from a general photo release.

We always get additional releases and whatnot. So yes, it's very important to make sure that you're doing that. And just so that people are clear what you're going to be doing with the imaging. That it's going to be out there. It's going to be part of the school image and culture.

MELINDA HOLT: OK. From Tom Keating, "What about ethical considerations surrounding use of social media, particularly as educational institutions?"

DREW GAMET: Well, it's interesting. That's something I we probably could include in this presentation. I didn't even think about that. That's another way that Approach, and the specialists that we work with, is definitely helping us because sometimes people will post things that are just inappropriate and whatnot into the feeds. It doesn't happen very often at all.

The good thing is that because someone is in there and they are watching what's going on and what's getting posted and whatnot, there is a way to basically-- if someone posts something that's inappropriate, we take it down. We can mute it. There's a couple of different techniques that you can use, so that type of information doesn't get up there.

Definitely, we're aware that cyberbullying is a real issue for a lot of students and whatnot. And we just don't want people being put in a position where they're being made to feel uncomfortable. And Approach is on it.

MEGAN SHROY: And it's our job to be monitoring that. Yeah, 24/7. And we really pride ourselves in quick action. And so having someone to at the helm who has the expertise of saying, no, this is something that should stay up, and we should respond this way. This type of content we're going to take down.

And having that policy that we set up front and really follow is the way that we work in those situations, and that's our process. But it's a great question. It's a great conversation. I will say we work with education clients ranging from schools like South Bay Adult School, to the Ohio Department of Education, to school districts, to personal superintendents, where we're managing their brand.

So we've got a lot of experience in this area in using social media in education and what works and what doesn't.

DREW GAMET: And that's a metric that the students can see by the way. They can see how quickly you respond to things. And that's really important. I mean, if they see school responds within an hour, they know that this is an active place where information goes back and forth. If they see typically responses come in two to three years, they're probably not going to do that.

MELINDA HOLT: OK. Jamie Nash. "Do you incorporate your presented social media strategies with your consortium members?"

DREW GAMET: I'm sorry. Say that again.

MELINDA HOLT: "Do you incorporate your presented social media strategies with your consortium members?" So what you presented, do you share that with your consortium members as well?

DREW GAMET: Well, we certainly share that what we're doing and how we're doing it and whatnot. They're not-- what we're presenting today is what we do specifically as a school. But certainly, any of these types of activities could be scalable across consortia for sure as an additional tool. It would just be how your consortia comes together to do that. Ours doesn't do that, but other consortia certainly could.

MELINDA HOLT: OK. From Anthony Misner again, "Are the costs and allowable expense for CAEP?"

DREW GAMET: So just like you can use your CAEP funds, obviously, we have websites and we have-- and with the old traditional print media for promoting and communicating with students and making sure that your community is aware of the programs that you have and how you can be of service to them, you can-- social media is definitely another one of those tools.

MELINDA HOLT: OK. And Margie Moriarty, and Lauranda Morar both had a similar question. "Does South Bay Adult School still do print brochure at all, or is it all digital? And what print media are SPAS still using?"

DREW GAMET: Typically, we're not doing those as much. And part of that is also because we have a-- we're using Approach exclusively with our main seven CAEP program areas that we're operating in. We also have a separate fee-based community. We call community education, but fee-based classes, quilting and swimming and some basic physical education classes that we also do.

We haven't restarted those yet. So we really haven't had a chance to explore using it for those types of uses, but certainly we could. So we haven't done a print brochure again because we haven't had those particular types of programs up and going. But for right now, all of the other 7K programs we are doing exclusively some form of digital marketing.

MELINDA HOLT: OK. This is the last question that's in the chat. So everyone, if you're still here and you still have questions, go ahead and put them in the chat. From Christine, "What is SBAS's projected timeline relationship with Approach?"

DREW GAMET: We've got a great relationship, so right now we're continuing on.

MEGAN SHROY: Yeah, I think what we're projected out for the next year right now. And again, I think that's one of the benefits of working with an agency that is focused on digital media because we're reporting every month. That's how we keep our job as the agency partner is by showing how we're moving the needle month in month out.

There should be no questions in what we're doing. I think Drew can attest to that. We are constantly proving out how this is working.

MELINDA HOLT: And the room goes quiet.

MEGAN SHROY: Excellent. Drew, do you mind sharing that last slide so that we can get our contact information to everyone?

MELINDA HOLT: And while you're doing that, I'm going to-- there another question came in. From Sheila Davis, "Can you give an idea of how large your program is? How many students are registered with SBAS?"

DREW GAMET: So right now, we're doing a little bit of this with everyone else. We've got currently 1,200 students on our books. And so-- yeah, so that kind of gives you an idea about how big we are. Actually, Megan, I don't have that last slide. If you could maybe--

MEGAN SHROY: No problem. I don't mind sharing. I think I have permission to do that. Let me make sure I do.

DREW GAMET: Yeah, we're not huge, but we're not tiny, so kind of in the middle. I think-- someone said medium-sized. Yes, Sheila medium-sized sounds about right.

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MEGAN SHROY: Excellent. And you can see here two QR codes. One will take you to South Bay Adult School's website. And one will take you to Approach's website. So you'll feel free to reach out to us that way. I also dropped my email in the chat as did Drew. I am always happy to take additional questions following the presentation, like I said to hop on and chat about the marketing goals and initiatives of your organization and see if there's an opportunity for us to work together in this way.

DREW GAMET: And I guess the other thing too is just remember that there's a lot of people with a lot of different perceptions and understanding about what this is. This was a part-- especially the internal conversations, a lot of ongoing internal conversations, just to create an understanding about what we're doing and what's the difference between doing this and just, and like we said before and just posting selfies or just having someone on staff just posting a few things.

So just make sure to have the conversation and have the conversation again and answer questions and just keep on clarifying.

MEGAN SHROY: And we're here to help you have those conversations as well. As Drew and I went back and forth in the beginning, we created presentations explaining this, we create a video explaining what we are trying to do and then we were committed to reporting out along the way.

And so I think this is-- we're going on our third year of working together. And it's been an education process from start to finish. So it does require a shift in mindset in the beginning. And we're very committed to helping make that shift.

DREW GAMET: And the data just helps.

MELINDA HOLT: And we've got another question that just came in. "Are Facebook Lives part of your posts?" Or Facebook Lives?

DREW GAMET: I don't know. Megan?

MEGAN SHROY: I think-- so Facebook Lives are actually really interesting. They're with Facebook's most recent algorithm prioritized higher than any other content that you can share. So taking live feeds into consideration as part of your content mix is something that we should be looking at.

And Facebook is constantly coming out with new ways of connecting with audiences, from stories to the way that they prioritize video, to the way they switch up even their static posts, and the ads that we can run. So it is definitely-- Facebook Lives are definitely a tool that shouldn't be ignored. For some audiences, it works. For some audiences, it's a little harder. In the case of South Bay Adult School with the language barrier, it can be harder. It doesn't mean it won't work. Any other questions?

MELINDA HOLT: It's starting to settle down.

MEGAN SHROY: Well, I really appreciate everyone's time. You guys have been a great audience. I loved all the questions. Like we said, we can make this deck available to anyone and everyone. And Drew, just always appreciate the partnership with you and getting to work closely with your team.

DREW GAMET: Yeah, and likewise. The level of conversation and community-- I know there's negative stuff from the press. But boy, it is a real way to actually take something and use it for some real positive, some positive impacts for your students, especially when people are feeling isolated. And that and that can be a very real thing for a lot of our students.

So I'm just thankful that we were able to share this information with you. And Megan, thank you, and thank you all for listening.

MELINDA HOLT: All ready. And on that note, before everyone leaves, I'm going to ask that you actually email the presenters for the presentation. So the chat's running fast, and they're not going to be able to get everybody's email address from that. So we put their email addresses in a couple of times. Go ahead and copy that and then email Drew or Megan, and they'll be able to get that to you.

Please, everyone remember to do the evaluation. Those help not only the presenters know how well they did, but it also helps TAP know how things went and also use that information for next year's summit. You all are getting out a little early. Yay! So as long as there aren't any questions coming, I think we're good.

Go ahead and get out. And go have a great lunch. All right. Thank you all for coming.

MEGAN SHROY: Thank you everyone.

DREW GAMET: Thank you everyone.

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MELINDA HOLT: And make sure you come back after lunch. Go visit the exhibitors. I forgot to say that. Go visit somebody. Ask a question. All right, Drew and Megan, I have your emails. I will send you a Google share doc.

DREW GAMET: OK.

MELINDA HOLT: It has all the questions--

MEGAN SHROY: All right.

MELINDA HOLT: --so that you-- all right? So I've copied them all and put them in this Google Doc. If there's nothing else you need--

DREW GAMET: I think we're good.

MELINDA HOLT: We're good. OK. Megan just a note on your end. If you have any other presentations, you're very echoey. Using a headset would be spot-on. But the room you're in it must be large because--

MEGAN SHROY: It is.

MELINDA HOLT: --it's echoey there. And then when-- yeah.

MEGAN SHROY: Thank you for letting me know. I appreciate that.

MELINDA HOLT: Sure, no problem. And someone's asking for the emails. Todd, I just posted them in the chat again. So Drew and Megan, if you guys want to leave, I'm going to make sure everyone's OK here.

DREW GAMET: OK.

MELINDA HOLT: We'll see you around.

MEGAN SHROY: All right. Thank you so much.

DREW GAMET: Wonderful. Thank you, guys.

MEGAN SHROY: Really appreciate it.

DREW GAMET: Bye bye.

MELINDA HOLT: All right. And on that note, come on everybody. So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodnight. Get out. Get out. Thank you all for attending. Make sure you go visit exhibitors. Make sure you come back after your lunch. All right, I'm going to go ahead and end the meeting now. Bye bye.

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