Marketing Campaigns & Outreach

Target Audience(s)

There’s no such thing as an effective and generic marketing campaign. If your message is too generalized, there is little chance of it being effective with anyone. What makes a marketing message powerful is that it moves its intended audience.

You will have a hard time making your message move people if you haven’t taken the time to figure out who they are and what they need. Your message is going to have to speak to their needs, their wants, their motivations, or their fears.

Most people care about kids. Most know the existing educational system isn’t working. Most wish to have the kind of respect and freedom we grant each other at an ALC.

Before you do ANY marketing action (whether planning an event, choosing keywords for a Google Ad, or writing a press release), ask these questions:

• Which audience(s) are we targeting?

• Is this channel an effective way to reach that audience?

• How do we tailor our message to move them?

• What clear call to action can we make?

You are not going to have the kind of old-school multi-billion dollar advertising budget to lodge your brand name in people’s consciousness seven times so they start to think you’re legit. Each of your marketing campaigns should include a clear action (like come to this event, visit our web site, email us here, enroll now because we only have two openings left, etc.)

Generating Free Exposure

Referrals, Gossip, & Creating a Buzz

Realistically, most of your students will come from referrals. Let’s say that another way: Chances are good that there is no magical advertisement, newspaper article, or community event that is going to generate a landslide of student enrollments. Most of your students are going to come in from word of mouth referrals by people in your community talking about the school. Even if you get a bunch of prospects from an event or article, your conversion rate of prospects to students will be higher on personal referrals.

That means THIS IS YOUR MOST IMPORTANT MARKETING CHANNEL.

That’s why we’re putting it first and we’re writing the most about it. We want you to know how to make referrals as reliable and effective as possible. It’s free. It’s scalable. It’s authentic. It’s powerful. And if you learn to leverage referrals, you may not need to do many other marketing campaigns (once you’ve gotten your community up and running.)

The problem is that most organizations think referrals are random and outside their sphere of influence. Or even worse, when they try to influence referrals, they make the mistake of bribing the people making the referral. This practice can produce the opposite effect and have people not talk about your school, because they don’t want their friends to think they’re doing it for a sales commission.

You can’t (or shouldn’t) make people talk about you, but you certainly can establish conditions to multiply the chances that they’re going to, and make them feel confident you’ll take good care of anyone they send your way. These are some keys to boosting your referrals*:

Novelty: Are you providing something new and/or exciting? People don’t talk much about old news. “New” is quite literally the basis of “news.” On one level, the ALC model itself is new and exciting, which works in your favor if you keep your community connected to news about its growth and expansion. However, for families that have been involved with your school for a while, you probably need to keep providing news which is tailored to support them in having novel things to talk about. Examples might be big accomplishments that came out of recent student projects, the music studio you just built, the 3-D printer you got, the video game the kids built, the show of student artwork in a local gallery or coffeehouse, and powerful stories of kids’ growth. This isn’t about flooding people with news weekly updates or newsletters. You can also provide novelty by coming up with new ways of talking about the school. Making breakthroughs in your mini-summaries and actively sharing those breakthroughs in meetings, newsletters, and events keeps giving people fresh ways of talking, which makes it easier for them to talk to people about it without feeling like a commercial. Another strategy is tackling controversial issues (like challenging standardized testing) to boost your novelty. People love talking about controversies! If your community doesn’t have new things to tell people about the school, they’re probably not talking about you. It’s your job to keep providing fuel for the gossip and buzz.

Utility: Are you providing something vitally useful? People generally won’t tell someone about something they don’t think will be useful to them. Part of this should be easy, because most people consider an education to be very useful. So your job is to demonstrate that THIS TYPE OF EDUCATION is useful -- ideally more useful than the typical approach.

Dependability: Do you reliably deliver a good experience? If people think it’s going to be hit or miss whether someone will have a good experience, they often won’t talk about you because they don’t want to be blamed for a bad encounter. This good experience must be assured on two levels. First, the parents must have a great customer care experience through the prospect/admissions process (Communications are returned promptly. They feel welcome. Next steps are clear and easy to navigate. The outcome is clear and understandable, especially if they don’t become a student.). Second, they and their child must have good experience of the product itself (a positive experience at a guest event, a visiting week that inspires confidence). Finally, a good schooling experience if they enroll).

Economy: Are you providing good value? Having a sliding scale tuition can really help with this one, but obviously some families are challenged to pay any tuition at all. Demonstrating to your community that you’re committed to keep tuitions affordable, your expenses lean, and your budgeting inclusive helps build faith in the affordability of what you’re providing. It can also be useful to specifically tell people things like “ALC NYC tuition is about half the average Manhattan private school tuition according the Wall Street Journal.” Providing people with context for the affordability of what you’re doing helps them feel good about the cost of participating.

(*Note: the framework for this section is borrowed from Embracing the N.U.D.E. Model by Scott Degraffenreid and Donna Blandford.)

Score your school or project on a 0 to 10 scale on your delivery of each of the N.U.D.E. domains. If your score comes out below 30, your referral volume will be fairly low and random (normal), but if you can put things in place to make sure you come out between 30 and 40 you can start building a pretty active and reliable flow of referral activity (buzzy).

Follow-up with the referrer is vital: Finally, after receiving a referral, thank the person who sent them to you. And then, no matter what stage of the process the prospect makes it to, let the referrer know the outcome and how they were taken care of. This follow-up is key part of ensuring the experience of dependability and makes them more likely to do it again.

Once again, having a clear way of tracking your prospects through all the stages of your admissions process is vital to having referrals work.

Attending Events & Feet on the Street

Other people in your local area are probably already organizing events about children, education, agile software development, lean management, building intentional community, or other relevant subjects. Lucky you, because they’re gathering people together and all you have to do is show up. Okay… it’s not all you have to do. You also have to practice opening your mouth and sharing about how their passion is expressed and included in the design of your ALC.

Having people actively going to relevant events is a great way to build the skills and confidence to share about what you’re doing in almost any setting. The person in line with you at the checkout, your waitress, the people on the bus, the person pumping gas across from you, are all prospects. Most people care about kids. Most know the existing educational system isn’t working. Most wish to have the kind of respect and freedom we grant each other at an ALC. They’re already an ally. You just have to figure out how they can discover that they already are.

Hosting Events

Hosting events often seems like a good idea, and it certainly can be, but it also takes a lot of work to make them good. It’s better to go to other people’s events than to organize bad events. It’s hard to make a good impression when you have poor attendance, are disorganized or unprepared, have chosen a bad venue, run around frantic and stressed, or fail to engage attendees powerfully.

Remember the second root of the Agile Tree about people’s experience of HOW things went will overshadow WHAT you wanted to tell them. If you’re going to host an event, then do the work to have it be great. You can design great events that don’t take too much work, but it takes a little practice and grace to have that happen.

Before EVERY event: First, have a way for people to RSVP, then follow up with people who have sent in an RSVP with reminders to come (by phone, email or both). Have a sign in table at the entrance of the event (preferably with a sheet pre-printed with RSVPs, so you know who came, who didn’t, and can sign in people who didn’t RSVP). Provide nametags for guests, have hosts wear nametags, and practice using people’s names. Welcome people and make sure they know where to go and what the plan is. Ideally, have your more outgoing students involved in greeting people. Have standard agile materials readily available (whiteboard, sticky notes, markers, etc.). Keep a couple hours immediately preceding the event clear so you aren’t late or harried with last minute scrambling.

At the “Climax” of EVERY Event: Provide a clear call to action. If your event is going well, then you’ve probably established a connection with your guests. That is the critical moment to invite them to act. Sit them down to schedule a visiting week and have them promise to complete the online application by a certain time (or hand them a paper one to complete on the spot). Pass a sheet for newsletter sign-ups. Invite people to volunteer at the school. Make sure there is a clear next step for each person who is ready to take one, then translate their commitment to a tangible written form. If you don’t, then as their warm fuzzy energy quickly dissipates, your event will just be a vague memory.

Introductions: If you host a basic introduction to your Agile Learning Center (whether you call it a Parent Interest Night, a Meet and Greet, or whatever), be sure to use our tools to make it adaptive, inclusive and participatory -- not a lecture or presentation. For example, one great way to do this is to use a group kanban board to manage the agenda. Ask people to introduce themselves and to share what inspired them to come and one or two primary questions they have. While they say their questions, facilitators are to write them on sticky notes. When introductions are complete, put all those sticky notes in the backlog to show them how they just created the agenda. Then you know exactly how to keep the conversation relevant, how to make sure everybody’s main concerns are addressed, and who to address which conversations to.

Open Houses: If you have a great school up and running, hold an evening open house. Engage your students in what they would want to share with the community, and in hosting and including the guest children who come. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Let people experience the joy and passion of your students by being hosted by your students. You can set aside an hour for the adults to meet (after they’ve had a chance to have some first-hand experience), and do a mini-introduction.

Partner Events: One of the challenges in organizing a good event can be having a lot of new prospects to engage with. One easy way to accomplish that is to co-host an event with a partner organization who brings their people and you bring yours. This is especially valuable if your ALC and the partner organization have plans to work together, or enough complimentary overlap of purpose. A local plumber’s union is probably not a great organization to throw an event with, but a chess club, run by a volunteer at the ALC might be, if you have families in who are into chess.

Fundraisers: These events can range from bake sales or walk-a-thons to fancy galas. Realize that a series of small fundraiser events mostly keep asking your same core community members for money as well as the time and energy to participate and help organize it. Big fancy events are really only effective if you can bring in new blood who can pay $100 a plate for that dinner and will bid on things in your silent auction.

We don’t want to discourage you from doing fundraiser events, just be sure that a large part of your focus is figuring out how to attract new people so that your not just asking the families already paying tuition to provide all your fundraising money.

For now, we’re skipping writing more about how to plan and organize good fundraisers -- check online for guides to doing it right. [Bookmark for future edits.]

Crowdfunding Campaigns

Crowdfunding is a fairly recent fundraising strategy using websites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, GoFundMe, or Razoo to garner community support and funding for a project or organization. The school could do a campaign, students could do it for a special project or trip, and families could raise funds for tuition.

If you decide to do a fundraising campaign, there are sites and services to help you succeed, but here are of the basics:

• Be sure you’ve built a solid base of people in online social media for spreading word of your campaign.

• Tell an inspiring and engaging story with a human face

• Produce a brief video to draw people into your cause with a clear call to action

• Request support for a specific goal. Not a general “support our school” request, but help us get this equipment for our recording studio, or get a 3D printer, or build out our makerspace.

• Make the impact of someone’s contribution clear, not just vague support for paying the bills or salaries.

• Come up with creative benefits for contributors, but make sure they don’t take too much time or energy so that you end up being drained by people contributing money.

• Set a funding target that is a good stretch but not too far out of reach.

• Send updates about your progress to people who have already pledged, and as you approach your target make appeals for them to help get you over the edge. Many will contribute more.

But crowdfunding campaigns are not just about getting money, they can be an opportunity to build exposure and circulate a good story about your organization or a project within your organization. If possible, get that story published in other media (news spots or articles) with links to your campaign early on. Also consider using tools like Thunderclap to boost visibility of your campaign on social media channels.

Presence on Strategic Places

Create an outreach committee with parents and community leaders and make monthly promises to post comments to relevant educational articles and blogs. Find neighborhood/parenting email lists and join them -- tell stories about children loving their school and announce events. Send letters to editors in response to magazine or newspaper articles. Brush up against some of the controversial topics that self-directed education elicits.

Strategic Relationships & Partner Orgs

Find your allies. Do you have local Makerspaces and Hackerspaces? Free Range Parenting groups? Unschooling collectives? Agile Methodology Meetups? Parent groups protesting standardized tests? Tap into their communities and events. Figure out how to serve them and improve their communities as well.

Are there educational consultants that parents turn to find the right school for their kids? Can you connect with guidance counselors in local schools who are advising students who are too advanced, too bored, or too whatever? Can you come up with other strategic relationships for having someone send students and families your way because of the work they’re already doing?

Appearances, Interviews, & Features

Can you schedule speaking gigs in local Agile Meetups or Makerspaces? Do you have access to Radio/TV people to have interview you? Can you find relevant Internet podcasts to be a guest speaker on? Do you have access to people who can write articles about the school (magazine, newspaper, educational blogs, etc)? Can you write your own article and post it somewhere that needs interesting content?

Press Releases

Press releases, almost by design, tend to be pretty lifeless and boring. You can write them if you want, but unless you have a powerful distribution mechanism to get them to numerous media organizations as well as something really newsworthy or exciting to invite people to, you’re probably not going to produce a lot of prospects this way. You might pique the interest of a journalist, but you could do that better by directly contacting journalists who write about relevant issues.

Paid Advertising

We would recommend NOT paying for advertising until you’ve gotten skilled at delivering your message in very brief ways to your main target audiences.

No matter how good a particular advertising channel might be at putting something in front of your audience's eyes, if you don’t have effective ad copy/images/appeal, you won’t be able to convert those eyeballs to active prospects. You’ll only waste money unless you can create effective ads.

Traditional Advertising

Newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, mailers… these things all still exist, and they’re all still fairly poor at converting eyeballs to customers. Once you incorporate your school, you will probably start receiving calls from local family and parenting magazines or other media who try to sell you ads.

We've gotten zero results from traditional ads so far, so would say skip it unless you're certain of a great fit. Maybe another ALC will come along with better expertise and results in this channel and if so, we will update this section of the Starter Kit with their story.

Targeted Internet Age Advertising

School Directories: We’ve had mixed success with these. We’ve received some prospects and inquiries. Check services like Alexa.com to see how much web traffic their site receives, and guess what percentage of that traffic would be looking for your kinds of alternative schooling. We had people try to sell us listing on their school directories who received less web traffic than we already received. We should have sold them an ad!

Yellow Pages / Super Pages / White Pages: YP.com will allow you to create a free listing, but will then also attempt to sell you more marketing materials. The free listing is good, but decline anything that costs money. This isn’t how people search for schools and they charge too much money.

Neighborhood Directories/Websites: Some places have very active local websites that people use for finding out about local events and resources. These can be a good place to post articles and information about your school, or even pay for ads or a listing in a local school directory. You really need to gauge the cost with the amount of traffic you think it can generate for you.

Google Adwords: Adwords lets you show up as featured listing based on matching searches for particular keywords in your local area. Almost everybody uses Google to look for things, including local alternative schools. You pay a particular price per-click. In big cities with lots of competition, this can be quite expensive, in smaller areas it can be somewhat affordable.

Make sure your ads link to a landing page with content directly relevant to what your ad said (see below for more info). If you are starting an ALC in an area with more affordable rates, and are a member of the network, check with us to see if we may have some adwords funding from Google.org available for you.

Facebook Advertising: Facebook provides a couple of approaches. You can “boost posts” on your pages, like announcements for events. Or you can display ads which can target people with very specific demographics (e.g. single professional mothers between the ages of 35 and 45 with interests in X, Y, or Z). If you’re really clear about who you want to target, Facebook can be a great way of reaching those very specific people. Make sure your ads link to a landing page with content directly relevant to what your ad said (see below for more info).

Track of Leads and Conversions: Use your prospect tracking tools to help you keep track of where leads came from, and how far those leads make it through your enrollment process. Do you get web visitors, but no RSVPs for events? Do they RSVP for an event and never come? Do they come and find out it’s a bad fit and never apply? This can tell you a lot about where you want to keep putting time, energy and money into generating leads in the future.