Celina Shands: Chatbox, saying hi to everyone. And let me go ahead and get the PowerPoint. If you're looking for the PowerPoint, I posted a Bitly link that you can go to and get the PowerPoint. So go ahead and grab that early if you would like.

And we'll use the chat a lot to communicate with you today. So if you have any questions or you haven't introduced yourself, go ahead and put your name and organization in the chat. And what burning questions do you want to answer from this session? You chose it for a reason, so go ahead and put it in there, and we can certainly go with that and make sure all your questions are answered.

I'm, as Diana said, I'm Celina Shands. I'm the CEO and founder of Full Capacity Marketing. For those of you who don't our agency, we've been in the market past 20, almost 21 years now. And our passion is workforce and education, branding, marketing, and communications.

And we're super excited to be here with one of our clients, Crystal Robinson. And Crystal, why don't you introduce yourself?

Crystal Robinson: Hi, everybody. Crystal Robinson, Project Director or Consortium Lead for the South Bay Adult Education Consortium/ Southwestern. We are the southernmost consortium all the way down in San Diego.

Celina Shands: Fantastic. And my neck of the woods. I'm based in San Diego as well. So we are really excited, Crystal and I, to present on this concept of going digital to help boost enrollments, and doing it through and leveraging the Move Ahead with Adult Ed campaign.

If you have not heard about that, this is the session for you. We're actually celebrating one year of the campaign. It's a national campaign to help boost awareness about what you all do in the field, nationally, with adult education and the value proposition or the benefits behind it.

We're going to talk about how to leverage the campaign to boost enrollments, particularly going into a case study of what Crystal and her consortium did in using the campaign. And then I will also end with giving you free resources, and also how to join the campaign because there are benefits to doing so.

So that's sort of our lineup here. Let me just kind of check the chat here to see if you have any burning questions. I see a lot of familiar faces here. Great. Thank you for introducing yourself.

All right. So here is how for the Move Ahead with Adult Ed campaign, how it sort of got started. And this started with the Coalition for Adult Basic Education, which is a national organization that represents adult educators. They do a lot of advocacy. We help them out with the Educate and Elevate campaign years ago when funding was being cut.

And the whole idea here is when COVID hit, Sharon Bonney, who is the CEO of COABE, said, gosh, we really are the best kept secret. And one of the problems that we have is we don't have a national presence. Like who is adult education? What are we all about? And really helping to inform prospective students, hey, here's where your local adult education providers are through a locator map.

And also, what are the options for students in terms of what you do for them? And a lot of people think is just ESL or adult basic education. And you do so much and there's such a career steppingstone or can be a career steppingstone in terms of helping prospective students.

So Sharon and I, and her leadership team, came up with this campaign. And you access the campaign by going to moveaheadwithadulted.org. And it's basically a very simple campaign landing page. And I'll walk you sort of through what we've done here in terms of just getting out key messages that are really important why adult education is important.

In one year, we've attracted about 5 million potential adult learners to this website with an average of about 370 clicks per day going to it. So one of the most important features, and you see here, is kind of the home page here.

And you go into four kind of key areas of what adult education is all about-- finish what you started in high school, get job training, learn computer skills, learn English, that sort of goes into what each of those things are for adult learners.

And one of the most prominent features on the website is the locator map. The locator map is really important. It allows someone to go in here and say, I'm within this zip code, and where are my adult education providers in that area.

So Google Ads, I'll talk about that in a minute. It drives adult learners to this website. And it benefits the programs that are registered, their school, on the site with free referrals. So as of September, we've had about 2,300 schools that are on the locator map.

If your school is or program is not on the locator map, then all you have to do is complete a very simple form. And if you download the PowerPoint, it gives you the link here. We'll also post it up in the chat. But you don't want to miss out on free exposure and referrals. So that's one kind of prominent feature for the campaign itself.

Let's talk about who the campaign targets and how we get all those people to the website. So who does the campaign target? So first of all, we're managing a Google Ads grant to get people to the website to get prospective learners. And it allows us, in this ad campaign, to microtarget adult learners nationally based on different parameters.

So their common behavior and interest, which is a key-- and Crystal, we'll talk about this in a little bit, which talks about the data and the data we use to monitor campaigns. Really important when you're targeting and going digital that you're looking at common behavior and interest of your students, so that you're not spending your money unwisely in terms of ad campaigns.

We can also target cities with low educational attainment. So those that have limited English proficiency for your ESL classes as an example. We can target students and those prospective students with cities and the highest rates of unemployment and/or those that may have low quality jobs.

Let's see. And then how we get folks there? So this micro-targeting is really, really important. And then how we get there is COABE has secured a Google Ad Grant. If you're a nonprofit, you might want to check this out because this is a fantastic way to actually get grant money for advertising.

And it allows nonprofits $10,000 a month for advertising. Now just think about how your life would change for enrolments if you could have $10,000 advertising per month. Now there are specific strict parameters around the usage, and your ads have to perform. They're not just going to give you the money, and then not have the ads perform.

And so we're able to manage the grant on behalf of COABE to get adult learners to the website. And due to the campaign performance, what they do if your campaign performance is at a certain level each month, then they'll continue the grant for you. And so now, it's in its 18th month for the campaign.

So this is good news for you because again, if you're on that locator map, there's no charge to get on the locator map, we're pushing students there. Again, 5 million have accessed this website. And they're looking to find you. So there's a real appetite for what you do. That's the good news in showing the data points for the campaign.

When you do a digital campaign, there are several things that we look at and several things that Google looks at in terms of maintaining that grant. One is impressions, the number of times the ad was shown. There's no requirement for the Google Ad Grant.

So the one year result, we just put out the one year results for this particular national campaign. It was 436,000 where the number of times the ad was shown. And you'll learn here, today, that it takes a tremendous amount of what we call touch points to get an adult learner to enroll.

A touch point can be they saw an ad, maybe they talked to a counselor, they saw your website. Maybe they saw social media posts. But it takes anywhere from 5 to 12 touch points to get a student to enroll. That is a lot. So the campaign is actually getting in front of students, and that is a touch point.

The click through rate, the second line here, is really the number of clicks that your ad received. So it's not just, oh, I saw it in my feed, but I'm now clicking on it and engaging with it. And look at the appetite for adult learning.

5% is what is required for the Google Ad Grant. Higher is obviously better. And our average in that year is 17.24%. That's 360% higher than the benchmark. And what does that tell us? Again, there's high engagement in and people want to have effectiveness in reaching a relevant audience. So that's important. Again, high appetite for what you do.

The other thing Google looks at is what we call a CPC or cost bid per click. It's the amount of advertising, an advertiser is bidding for each click. And $2 is the maximum bid, lower is better. And we have here, we're going around $1.36. And that shows that our keywords are really on point.

We're going to show you some of the ads too. And when you get the PowerPoint, I'd really encourage you, if you're looking to go digital, to pull some of that messaging as a starting place to target your particular audiences within your market.

And then the ad spend, this is the amount spent on the monthly advertising from the grant. $10,000 is the max, higher is better. And you can see, we're running between $7,100 and $9,100. And that shows that we're maximizing the use of the Google brand. On average, it's about $300 per month.

So this tells you that the campaign is performing really well. Here are some of the best performing ads from a national perspective-- learn new skills, find an adult school near you. And so again, some improve English speaking, English speaking courses, or in high school diploma.

Here are some of the ads here. And I'm sharing these with you because, again, when you get the PowerPoint, these are ads that have performed well. So use them. And even take some of the content and use it for your flyers or some of your more traditional elements that you may be using to outreach to students.

Some of the top three questions you may have as you're looking at this national campaign is to say, well, are learners in my area. So your particular city, your particular region, clicking through to the campaign, are they really engaged in the campaign?

Another question you may have is can I get the specific interest level of adult learners in your area? And the answer is yes. We're going to show you some charts here where the national ad campaigns have performed really well.

But if you're interested in learning about what this campaign and how it's performed in your area, please send us an email at info@fullcapacitymarketing.com. Because, the reason I'm bringing this up, if you have high interest in your area, it means you're primed to work with us to get build the momentum and do a lead generation campaign to boost enrollments, as Crystal is going to show you here in a minute on what we did with her regional consortium.

I'm going to show you some charts here as an example on the National campaign. So we break these down into large cities, smaller size cities. And I put the arrows there on what's been performing in the last year.

Now, remember, a click through rate of 3% to 5% is considered good. In the San Francisco area, you've got almost over 20% of click through on that ad. Why is that important? Because if we can take this data, now that we have it on file, and retarget that 20% of the market who has already expressed an interest, that 20% went to the national locator map to find you.

But we can also take that 20% and retarget those people who have already gone and expressed an interest in this campaign to get them to enroll with you. If we look at the mid-sized cities, you can see Anaheim is performing well, San Jose, Sacramento. All of those are really trending well in terms of the national awareness campaign.

The other thing we do is we put together what we call a look-a-like audience on digital. You'll see, when we go through Crystal's campaign, digital is so powerful. Because if you think about you put a billboard out or invest in something like that or radio, you're not sure you're doing a scattershot. And it may help build awareness, but is it generating leads? And the answer is probably not because a lead campaign is very different than an awareness campaign.

A lead campaign-- what is a lead? A lead is an interested student, an interested prospective student, who is actually given you their contact information, and say, yes, I want you to follow up. So if you don't see yourself on these charts and you're interested in knowing how the campaign is performed in your particular area or city, so far, just send us an email at info@fullcapacitymarketing.com, and we'll pull that data down for you.

So hopefully, this is getting you excited because you want to be on the locator map. It's free. I also have a toolkit, I'll share with you at the end, that you can use for building local awareness and all of that.

But really, where the good stuff is lead generation. And that's very different than an awareness campaign as I've said. And so Sharon has partnered with us, and because we've done so much work for them over the last five years, to provide folks additional options for an actual paid ad campaign.

Now what's in the paid ad campaigns? Some schools have opted to work with us to generate leads. It's a dedicated web page on the campaign website, hosted for one year and branded with your school's logo. And I'll show you Crystal's here in just a minute.

It also has a contact form for prospects to enter information. So that's one of the things. And that's important because if we draw people, generally, to your website, your website is one that's a built for business of the consortium. You probably have your minutes, there your committee members, all of the things that do not motivate a student. They don't need to know that information, but you have to post it up as part of your funding requirements.

As you'll see here, a web page for advertising is very different. It contains value propositions. And benefits for the student is generally one single page. And the whole goal is to get their contact information, period, to drive that lead.

It also gives you six weeks of professional digital ads. Now Crystal is going to talk about her first two campaigns because she's done two with us now and going into a third one.

And then a student leads report for schools to close to enrollment. And there's a lot of ways you can set this up. In a consortium model versus a single school, it's a little bit different. We'll talk about how to set that up.

OK. Before we get into Crystal's campaign, here is the performance on just the paid digital local campaigns that we've done so far. You can see, almost 5 million impressions, the number of times the ads appeared on the feeds. Look at the reach of almost 1.8 number of people who saw the ads. When you think about that, that is huge, working within your specific markets.

The main thing that's new on this particular dashboard is the student leads. And you can see, across 12 paid ad campaigns, we've had over 4,000 leads, which has been really great. And then you can see the difference performance and things of that nature here.

OK. Let's see. Before I pause and toss it over to Crystal, I wanted to see if there's any questions so far. Is this associated with national TV ad campaign, finishyourdiploma.org? It is not, Kathy. It was simply an ad campaign called Move Ahead with Adult Ed.

And we do digital ad campaigns. The Locator looks almost exactly like the one. OK, that's good because the more-- this is why this is good. If you can get on this finishyourdiploma.org website, I would do that as well. Because again, research shows, it takes between 5 and 12 touch points you get a student to enroll. So if you have the opportunity to participate in additional campaigns, it is always only going to help you.

If your information is incorrect, COABE actually handles that. I'm going to give you a form that you can fill out, a website you can go to and fill out the form. And then COABE can correct that information for you. They handle the map, if you will.

Teresa says, I use the hashtag on my flyers, catalog, and Facebook posts with Elk Grove. That's fantastic. In just a moment, after Crystal finishes her presentation, we'll go into the tool kit that's free, that you can download and actually help engage in the campaign that way through social media.

Are ads in Spanish? They absolutely are. In fact, Rosia, we're going to share with you how we change up those ads in different markets and what we did in Crystal's market.

OK. Let's see. All right. Good. I think that's it on the ads. OK. Crystal, I'm going to bring you on now to talk about-- and I love-- maybe you could start off by talking about how your consortium is configured and the partners there. And then we can move from there.

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. So our community college is Southwestern College. And they actually have a small continuing Ed department. The largest member is Sweetwater Adult Ed. They have about, I'd say, 90% of our programming is there.

So we have a large K-12 adult member, smaller community college member, and even smaller, another adult Ed, Coronado Adult Ed.

Celina Shands: Fantastic.

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. And so Sweetwater and Coronado are within the boundaries of Southwestern College. So the way our programs are set up is we all offer ESL. But after that, it gets kind of each member is offering different programs. Like if you wanted a diploma equivalency, ABE, that's only in Sweetwater.

If you want a particular CTE program, it depends. Like the Registered Behavior Technician program is only in Coronado. Welding program is only in Sweetwater. Optical Tech, only in Southwestern.

So we really had to look at what we wanted to advertise for, and really sit down and figure out how we're going to divvy this up. The ones where it's unique to the member, that's pretty easy. Like if somebody wants Optical Tech, we're sending them to Southwestern. But if somebody wants ESL, then we have to think about that.

And the great thing is, and I think we're going to get into this a little bit, but the leads, how Celina is mentioning that they put in their personal information. So we can see the zip code that they're coming from.

And so that makes more sense to see, OK, you're actually closest to this location when it comes to ESL. And if you're kind of in between a couple locations, we'll give you both of them. And then you can decide from there.

Celina Shands: Fantastic. And we had a lot of discussion about leads and how they're going to be distributed, and that type of thing. But really, I think the first part was this Crystal, right? What were the challenges that you all discussed coming into this and saying, should we go digital.

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. So surprise, surprise, large declines in enrollment from the pandemic. Before that, we had different iterations of mailers. We had gone from, way in the past, all members mailing a complete schedule of classes to-- now, some members are still doing that, some members are mailing a postcard. Some have stopped altogether.

Our consortium, it's a large area with a large population. So when we have to mail something, it's quite the investment because we're talking about lots of households to cover the entire consortium area. And we really wanted to do something that would be more targeted.

Before digital, when we would think of targeted marketing, it's putting a stack of postcards at a laundromat, for example. That's more targeted than mailing. So now, with digital, and we've learned a lot about the ads and how they're able to target as well.

How do we engage students? The funding of course. And as Celina mentioned before, our website is mainly for our consortium business. We don't necessarily want to direct students there to find classes. I mean, we do have information on that website, but it's not the ideal place for that.

Celina Shands: Yeah. It's kind of like thinking about it as a shotgun approach, where you're just kind of like blasting out lots of information versus really taking a look at well, where are my enrollments low, how do I reengage students. Going digital is more strategic.

And some of the solutions that we're bringing to this particular consortium is what's called micro-targeting non-returning and new students via what we call a custom audience. So Crystal actually provided-- I believe you did, Crystal, your former student list. Were you-- or am I getting you mixed up with another consortium?

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. I think we were discussing that. We're just throwing ideas out there in the beginning, but we didn't actually go for that one.

Celina Shands: Right. So another good thing to do, and we may talk about this in the third round with Crystal, is you can retarget your students who are on Facebook or Instagram or anything. We can actually give ads to them who've maybe dropped out. So it's that retargeting.

It kind of acts like, if you think about how you shop online, and maybe you're looking for mattresses. And then all of a sudden, you're going to another website or something. That mattress ad keeps following you around.

It's kind of that same concept. It's like OK, I'm interested in mattresses, so clearly, they're kind of targeting me. And the algorithm knows that. And it allows us, then, to create what's called a look-a-like audience and target communities that are very specific for adult Ed. Those with lower educational attainment, maybe low skilled workers, communities with highest rates of foreign born, non-speaking resident with ESL needs.

So it allows you to actually go into neighborhoods, not only zip codes, but break down by neighborhoods. And this is really important for some of you because you may have a zip code and have very affluent neighborhoods within there. And then two blocks over, you've got a poverty-stricken neighborhood, or maybe non-English speaking residents, or what have you.

You want to be able to use that advertising in those neighborhoods, not the whole thing. Because then, that waste your investment. You're not going to have an affluent person coming in, that's looking to do a four-year degree into your adult schools.

So that's why digital is so powerful. Oops, let me go back here. It also allows for data-driven approaches, so you can kind of monitor the data and what's working and what's not. And in Crystal's case, it gave a regional approach versus a single school outreach investment.

So a lot of you will say, well, I don't have money for advertising. But if you go through a consortium model, then you're able to pull your resources in that way. And Crystal, here's a picture of your current website that kind of demonstrates a lot of the things that we see typically on a consortium website, about the consortium, your meetings, your news.

You do have this thing called fine classes, but it's information loaded versus really getting into the psyche of these different market segments, and getting a message that will cut through the noise.

This is an important concept for you all to understand that it takes not only 5 to 12 touch points, but with the right messages. And we see anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 messages every day if you take internet pop up ads, billboards, radio, TV, et cetera.

How do you cut through that noise with the right value proposition? And one of the things that we do first off is we mirror and model the national Move Ahead with Adult Ed campaign website, except we brand it for the school.

So Crystal, I don't know if you want to talk about what we changed here on the site, but I know the demographics and the pictures were really important, if you want to chat about that a little bit.

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. You were able to-- the stock photos kind of match our particular demographics. We think we wanted to recognize that we have a very diverse population. And not only students, but the one in scrubs, we wanted to highlight, yes, we do have career training as well. So I think we were able to check a lot of boxes with that one.

Celina Shands: Definitely. So you see, it's the Move Ahead with Adult Ed campaign, but it's powered by a South Bay adult education. And you see their logo there. We can change the words here. So this is kind of like if you're scrolling down the one page, this is the top read, if you will.

You can also select the language that you want. And then here, in the second part of the web, again, remember, it's one page. This is Move Ahead with Adult Ed. Why adult education is important?

And then, in this campaign, you get four areas for promotion. Now, this was interesting, Crystal. I don't know if you want to talk about this. How did we come up with these four areas for you all?

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. So looking at our CAEP programs, in the beginning, actually the training for a new job, I think our first time around, it was very general, just that, train for a new job. But the second time around, we wanted to highlight that we do have lots of very different training programs.

And so that's how that particular bucket became a carousel. And I think you have some photos of that too. So yeah, so you have-- it's changing up. These are the career training that we have, that needs students. Because there were also very many career training programs that we had that were full.

And so we did not want to-- that's why we didn't want to continue with a general career training because many of them, actually, were full, but there were a few that definitely needed students, so we wanted to target.

And then the diploma, ESL, all of those were no brainers for us. We all needed students in those areas.

Celina Shands: Right. You mention a carousel ad. Here's an example. I had it on the screen. And what a carousel ad does when you go digital, the format allows you to show two or more images or videos, whatever you have.

And each has its own headline, description, link, and call to action. So you can see when you go digital, you go from this broad perspective down to who do I really want to target. Where do they live? And what are they most interested in? And that really saves sort of the funding.

This is the last part of the website. Well, actually, there's one more part that shows all of the branded logos, like powered by all of the partners and stuff. But prospects and leads are generated through either the campaign website, which you see here. And they give the zip code and all of that. The submit now goes to Crystal, and then she divvy's up. We'll talk about the operations and how leads were divvied up.

But these are just found by-- prospects are found from the website. They come to the website here and fill this out, or through the ad itself. So here's some more examples of ads. And someone was asking me, is it in different languages. And the answer is yes. When we sit down and work with consortium, it's important to understand the demographics and how the ad should be translated.

So here's a couple of high performing ads. And the other way you get leads is through the ad campaign itself, where there is what we call an in-app form. So if we go to Facebook, for example, if this ad's on Facebook, it'll say yeah, I'm interested. It'll allow the participant or the person to fill out their contact information right then and there.

And then here is another set of ads that we have. Crystal, I think this is the general career education. And Prep for College was kind of new. You want to talk about that? That was like a new-- something I had not promoted in previous consortiums, but yours has it.

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. That one was highlighting our Southwestern College continuing Ed courses with kind of a more general blanket for-- that's how we know we can hand that off to the non-credit program at Southwestern.

Celina Shands: Right. So doing this kind of approach requires data. And it requires planning and monitoring. And I'm going to go through-- Crystal, I'll go through some of the things that we consider when we do an ad campaign.

And I may have put a typo in-- what is it? CAEP data sets. OK. So I don't know if you want to talk about this, but this was a big discussion up front with a consortium.

Crystal Robinson: Right. So our CAEP barriers to employment, looking at how we're able to target these ads, they were actually already pretty lined up with our barriers to employ-- like the students were supposed to be serving in CAEP as well.

So we can target people without a high school diploma, people with limited English, unemployed. Like those are exactly the barriers to employment the students who were supposed to be serving in CAEP. So if we're talking about targeting, I mean, it's pretty 100% online right there.

Celina Shands: Right, exactly. And then again, going into the service areas to where they reside is super important. And then this one too, we had a big discussion on this because if we have a pot of money we want to spend on advertising, well, then, if we have a class full, we don't want to promote that.

So we really spend a lot of time on this one, Crystal, with a low enrollment. And I don't know if you want to share any about that, but we had some talks with the consortium members.

Crystal Robinson: Right. So for CTE, especially, really looking at which ones are full, which semester. Sometimes, ones are more popular than others. And with the nature of CTE, there is no open enrollment.

In CTE, you're in at a certain time, and that's it. So we really had to focus on which CAEP programs need students next semester. And then the other programs were pretty easy. I mean, we have tons of different ESL, high school diploma, ABE, things like that. We could always use students. And those are the open entry, open exit, constantly rolling in. So we can always use students in those program areas.

Celina Shands: Right. The other thing that we use with the enrollment data is looking at building, what we call student profiles. And this is not to pigeonhole students, but it really is to say, if we're going to go digital, we have to create what we call these look-a-like audiences on ad platforms that match Crystal's student demographics, their behaviors, their interest-based traits, which ad platforms allow you to do, and actually find these students.

So that's why really taking a look at your current snapshot is really important, and also where you want to go. OK. And then we also look at national and regional data.

And one of the things we do is to identify where certain groups may be underrepresented in adult Ed. For example, African-Americans without a high school diploma, they may comprise a certain percentage of California dropouts. Well, then, we're going to want to promote those similar percentages in the advertising spend.

So really, again, this is going from let's just throw our message out there and see if spaghetti sticks on the wall to let's see who we really want to target and be strategic. The other thing now that Crystal has two campaigns under her belt, we can look at past campaign performance data and say, wow, these ads really perform well in the last campaign, or these may need to be tweaked.

Digital allows you to test ads. And we do a lot of A/B testing behind the scenes to see what's working, what's not working, so that we, again, don't waste our money and our resources. And then of course, current campaign data to make course corrections.

So Crystal, you guys did, I thought, a really great job in your consortium of looking at the data and giving us feedback on saying, we want to tweak this out a little bit. I don't know if you want to talk about that. And also, I just got your email on the third campaign, and what you're hoping to do there. So maybe talk a little bit about course corrections you continue to want to make.

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. I remember one in particular. We would get leads pretty much daily. And we looked one day and we had like 40 leads for welding. And it was like OK, stop. That's enough. So let's redirect the rest of our campaign for other program areas.

Celina Shands: Yeah. It's really cool. It's like turning on and off a faucet and saying, OK, we're kind of done there. While Crystal's team is following up with the ads, and we're going to get into kind of the operational components because Crystal's consortium set up a little bit different, maybe different than you all. But yeah, it's kind of like turning on and off a faucet.

It's extremely flexible. It allows you to really examine leads by category, by demographic, by school. And then providing us with that feedback, so we can turn it on and off on different classes, that type of thing.

There's another situation, Crystal, where I think you had a last minute promotional need. I don't know if you want to talk about the open house, but that was really successful. We had a little-- we're at the end of the campaign, and you said, hey, we need help with this.

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. We were done with what we said we would do, and there was a little bit left over. And Coronado had an open house event. So this is an annual event that Coronado does at the beginning of the year. They mainly open it up to the community of Coronado to see, hey, this is what Coronado Adult Ed is all about.

But their traditional way of advertising is on the island of Coronado. So trying to attract anyone in surrounding areas, maybe just over the bridge, but actually would be interested in the programs that they were able to get the word out a little bit farther. You can see the results there.

Celina Shands: Yeah. The results there, you had almost 200 invites. So at the end of the day, you can see how these targeted campaigns really, really focus. And then lead distribution is also flexible. So OK. Let's say, you want to do this as a consortium model. There's a lot of discussion that happens upfront with the consortium on how these are going to be distributed.

It's obviously easier and single schools have done this campaign, where all the leads go directly to them. And consortium model, you're sort of adjusting that out to say, hey, we need here and there. So it's very flexible. But you also have to need a process for this.

And I want to talk a little bit about Crystal's process and how you all were set up. So Crystal, can you talk a little bit about that and what your role was with the lead. And by the way, the leads, if you see this lower right hand column, lower right hand visual, you'll see kind of how the leads come in.

First and last name, their email, their phone, their zip code, program, what program they're interested in, the source. And then you've got this green box over here, where it would be assigned to staff for follow up. And so Crystal, I'll let you take it from here on how I knew and Melissa did that.

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. So Melissa is the Administrative Assistant for our consortium. So she and I are the two employees that are assisting the entire consortium. So we have that kind of overview.

So it just makes sense when you have a lead coming in for ESL, for example. Then we have the overview to say, we're going to give them registration information, looking at all three members who would best fit or two out of the three that would best fit. And sometimes, we would send them all three.

But if we were to leave that up to each member, I mean, of course, each member would want to take for themselves. And it might not be the best fit, depending on what the student is actually asking for.

Aside from ESL, it would have been fairly easy. I mean, all the other programs are only offered at particular members. But we just decided just to keep it here. And I had asked Melissa to carve out a small piece of her day to follow up on these leads. Because they were coming in pretty much daily.

So to not have like dozens of leads to do at the end of the week, she's able to follow up with them. And not only from the spreadsheet, but since the-- especially in the second campaign, since the ads were going out like from our consortium social media, people were messaging us on our social media.

So they could be hitting on an ESL ad, but then their message is like OK, that's great. Do you also have a keyboarding class? Something like that. And so again, being at the consortium level, we know what everybody's offering or what's coming up, or all of that. So we're best poised to be able to answer those kinds of questions.

Celina Shands: Yeah. And I think that's really important. If you undertake a campaign like this, you need a process for distributing the leads out. And that's something that we want to talk with you about up front. Again, single school, pretty easy.

Crystal's-- she runs point with Melissa. So it's important to have that because you don't want the lead to just sit there. You want to do what we call lead nurturing. Again, remembering that it's going to take between 5 and 12 touch points to get that student to enroll. So I think on the second campaign, Crystal, we added texting and some other things to keep the leads warm, if you will.

And also knowing that just because a student doesn't enroll right away, doesn't mean they're not interested down the road. So you've got to keep sort of that communication process open with them. And the thing that Crystal was talking about here is they do have consortium level social media accounts.

So what they do is they added us as an advertiser, if you will. So we could go in and work from their account and run the ads. And that helps boost your social engagement as well. So a lot of things were sort of set in place.

Not all schools we work with have the systems. So we build the systems from kind of the bottom up. But I think this is really important to have the systems in place. We worked with a consortium not too long ago, and we put all the list on the spreadsheet. And then we thought, oh, they were going in and checking them. And it's like no, we need to back up and have a better system here. So you want to make sure you have the right system in place.

Crystal, anything else on lead follow up, if want to mention that you feel is important for the group here.

Crystal Robinson: Yeah. And we were just very hyper aware of the registration process for each member as well. For Sweetwater, for example, the only way to register is in person, compared to Southwestern and Coronado. They could be sent a link to register.

So we really have to strategize and figure out how we're going to be responding to each of these leads, depending on where we're going to be sending them to because the instructions are going to be very different.

Celina Shands: Exactly. And it's interesting because it's not a one size fits all. You really got to think through your operational structure and what is going to work. So that's super important. Kathy says, switching the task of two people made a huge difference in our agency. Great. Great job, Kathy. Yes. Having the right people.

So it's a learning process too in uncovering what systems you have in place and maybe what systems you need to do this type of continuing, nurturing, which is really what digital is all about.

I want to just show the results of the campaign. You've seen the impressions and reach, and people who saw the ad clicks to the website. You saw those in the national campaign. These are Crystal's data points.

But also, look at her leads. This is the number of prospective students who are interested in what Crystal's team has to offer. So there was 215 leads in the first, and 344 in the second. And that kind of gets better as we go along because in the first campaign, we have to set up the ads and do the creative and all that. And the second time around, a lot of that funding is just going straight into the ads. So you've got a little bit higher.

Crystal, do you want to talk about what's changes we're thinking about making in round three?

Crystal Robinson: I think not too many changes. I think we tend to skew toward more female certain age group. And we want to be able to target a more diverse population, but without ignoring anybody as well. But that's the only real change.

Celina Shands: OK. Great. Fantastic. So any questions for Crystal on this campaign? Go ahead and put them in the chat box. What I always like to do is leave folks with free tools and resources. This campaign has been so powerful, as you see from a national level.

And you can take a lot of the tools that we've developed in our tool kit that are free to download and start using them. And I'm going to talk about them right now. This web link here, which is moveaheadwithadulted.org/join-the-movement.

And if you go there, you can really take a look at all of the tool kits, and also get on the locator map as well under join the movement. So what's in the tool kit? Well, one you see it on the right there. There's a fact sheet that can be branded with your school's logo as a proud campaign partner. You can customize to include any of your details and programs to attract adult learners.

Audrey, I'm glad you like tool kits. You'll like this one. And schools too can post this asset to your websites. You can blast it out to your students. You can use it on social media posts, those types of things. So that's really powerful.

The other thing we did is we created a news release template for each school to tailor and share with their media. So it's really important that you let the media know that you're part of this campaign and what you have to offer. You can get stories and things of that nature, place in your local media.

Web copy-- one of the things in your toolkit is a logo for Move Ahead with Adult Ed. And you want to just put that on your website and say you're a proud partner. And it gives you a brief byline that says, hey, we're part of this campaign.

And it shows linkages to the campaign. Again, think about touch points, touch points, touch points. They're seeing this over and over again, nationally and your local area, Move Ahead with Adult Ed, really important.

And then we have an eNewsletter template. So to keep this in front of folks, there is an actual Move Ahead with Adult Ed eNewsletter template. So let's say, you want to do a quarterly newsletter to your students. By all means, go ahead and use the eNewsletter template. There's actually an inaugural, I think, edition there, that you can just take and use.

I wanted to point out, Robert Moore, this a gentleman. We're going to be presenting with him on Thursday around behind every employer campaign, which is the exact opposite is getting employers involved in adult Ed.

But he actually used this campaign and he said, they increased their media exposure. One of the local newspapers picked up the story. This was during COVID. And they only saw a 15% decrease in enrollments over this time last year as compared to the 42% statewide decrease.

Measurable skill gains, down 8% statewide compared to October 2019 are up 5% in our program. And they even had a local company contact them to begin a new workforce education initiative. So all from the toolkit, from the free toolkit. He just took it and went with it, which is fantastic.

I'll address the questions here that are coming in the chat, but there's three steps here. You want to download the campaign toolkit. You want to get your school listed on the locator map. And if you're interested in a statewide or regional or local Move Ahead with Adult Ed campaign, you can contact me at Celina@fullcapacitymarketing.com.