Objectives

The potential for success lives in every child, and there is nothing more powerful than a community coming together to help realize this potential. The Achieving Tomorrow: Voices creative communications campaign highlighted the impact educators, administrators, community leaders, parents, and business leaders can have when they join forces to help students succeed by preparing students for the jobs of tomorrow.

Our objective for this campaign was to raise awareness for the role and importance of education in preparing students for success in the workforce, with the goal of inspiring public support among target audiences. We also sought to highlight the contribution that business engagement can make towards these goals.

Strategy and Execution

In order to meet our campaign objectives, we pursued two clear strategies for our communications efforts:

1. Tell a compelling narrative to inspire action

Behavioral science research demonstrates that storytelling and personal narratives are the best way to communicate information and engage people around a particular viewpoint. Human brains have a bias toward processing and identifying with stories, particularly when they involve ‘people like us’.

By using portraits and stories from stakeholders across the entire education spectrum, we were able to humanize and communicate the overarching message around the value of education, while also depicting a cross-section of individuals that could connect with a broad audience.

To implement this strategy, we took the following steps:

• Evaluate message tone and framing to garner the highest engagement (through A/B message testing); and
• Tell local stories, strongly targeting relevant local audiences to foster meaningful interest and engagement.

2. Effectively engage target audiences on social media

Throughout the campaign, we constantly evolved our tactics and approach, testing the video content around several target audiences and optimizing accordingly. For each city, we shared content by hyper-targeting the local region, as well as neighboring states, to engage communities about the work happening in their own backyard. In addition to the geographical targeting, we also selected specific audiences, which included:

• Parents and Grandparents - Parents and grandparents represent decision-makers when it comes to their children’s education specifically, and influencers of education conversations collectively. They were therefore identified as core stakeholders to foster conversation and engagement around the value of ensuring all children have access to a high-quality education.
• Businesses – It was imperative to target those in the business community who are, or should be, engaged in preparing students for the jobs of tomorrow. The goal was to raise awareness by showcasing strong business and education partnerships and generate meaningful engagement around the important role that industry can play by connecting with students in the classroom and investing in the quality of education.
• Educators - Because the primary focus of the campaign was education, and progressive education approaches, we wanted to guarantee that the content would reach all teachers, education professionals, and those who ultimately can use key findings to inspire their daily work.

To implement this strategy, we took the following steps:

• Executed a paid media spend against the most compelling video content on Facebook and YouTube, in order to build an audience and foster engagement;
• Implemented a sophisticated and evolving targeting strategy (including geographical and demographics);
• Rolled out content in a way that would best reach the target audience and drive engagement; and
• Supplemented digital engagement with efforts to engage partners (such as the Girl Scouts) strategically, and leveraged native sharing by video participants (all of whom would share videos within their communities).

Results

By implementing the strategies outlined above, Achieving Tomorrow: Voices was enormously successful in generating engagement throughout local communities across the United States. Overall, the campaign surpassed our expectations by totaling 10.7M impressions and 3.8M video views across Facebook and YouTube, surpassing our benchmark of 3M video views. Below please find a breakdown of the results, per city:

Dallas

• By posting 4 videos on Facebook and YouTube, the Dallas campaign received 795K video views and 1.9M impressions.

Chicago

• By posting 3 videos on Facebook and YouTube, the Chicago campaign received 799.9K video views and 2.1M impressions.

Boston

• By posting 4 videos on Facebook and YouTube, the Boston campaign received 1.1M video views and 3.3 impressions.

New Orleans

• By posting 4 videos on Facebook and YouTube, the New Orleans campaign received 1M video views and 3.29M impressions.

It is evident from the success of this campaign that narrative storytelling leveraging digital distribution mechanisms has the capacity to pierce the public consciousness and generate engagement around important issues in the education space. Narrative storytelling is needed now more than ever, and creative communications efforts such as these are apt vehicles for reaching stakeholders outside of policy circles to foster meaningful conversation.

Media