Full Capacity Marketing - Non-Profit / Charity Campaign of the Year
Company: Full Capacity Marketing, Inc, Encinitas, CA
Company Division/Group:Full Capacity Marketing, Inc.
Company Description: For nearly 20 years, Full Capacity Marketing, Inc has helped workforce and education organizations build successful brands. Our national footprint includes adult schools, community colleges and nonprofits and associations at the national and state level. Our campaigns have earned more than 65 international awards. More at www.FullCapacityMarketing.com
Nomination Category: Communications & Marketing Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications or PR Campaign of the Year - Non-Profit / Charity
Nomination Title: Coalition on Adult Basic Education_#MoveAheadWithAdultEd National Awareness Campaign
Specify the date on which this campaign or program was launched: September 5, 2019
Adult education is an important part of our economic landscape as it advances the skills, knowledge and abilities of adult learners to meet their professional goals, through basic education (reading/math), learning English better and earning short-term career certificates to garner a job.
While not every job requires a bachelor’s degree, nearly every job created since 2008 requires some education or training beyond high school. Yet more than 100 million working aged adults do not hold any higher education credentials, creating a critical need to upskill the workforce through adult education. https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ovae/pi/AdultEd/making-skills.pdf
Funding for public sector adult schools fluctuates depending on federal administrations and policies. As such, marketing resources to raise awareness about the benefits of adult education and to help adult learners find the right educational pathways are scarce. This creates a struggle to maintain enrollment numbers, creating an illusion that these programs are not needed, when in fact, the issue is a lack of consumer awareness.
On a budget of $6K, the Coalition on Adult Basic Education (COABE), a nonprofit association that represents the more than 55,000 public-sector adult educators across the nation, partnered with Full Capacity Marketing (FCM) to create an affordable solution to 1) develop a campaign brand that all adult schools could use to raise awareness about the value of adult education; 2) build the capacity of adult educators to use the toolkit; 3) create a national campaign to help adult learners find adult education schools; and 4) help schools with limited budgets generate leads.
In September 2019, FCM met with adult education leaders from across the country through its partnership with COABE to discuss marketing challenges. Most of the leaders indicated that their schools used antiquated outreach methods and lacked funding for effective campaigns.
Because FCM specializes in marketing education and workforce missions across the nation, we utilized our extensive psychographic research to create behavioral and interest profiles of typical adult learners. Applying this research, we developed the brand name #MoveAheadWithAdultEd as an aspirational message to reach across all market segments.
A campaign toolkit for all adult educators was designed to include social media posts and strategies; electronic fact sheets; news release template; web copy and a campaign logo; and an eNewsletter template followed by a national webinar and technical assistance to support adult educators in deployment.
In March 2020, adult learners were hit particularly hard by the pandemic and when enrollments plummeted, FCM reconvened COABE to discuss the need for national awareness campaign. FCM donated time and talent to build a campaign website which launched in April 2020 and included a locator map of adult schools. Because COABE had no money for advertising, a $120K Google Ads scholarship was secured and FCM created and deployed ads to drive traffic to the website so that schools could obtain free referrals.
FCM created templated landing pages for those schools that could afford a local lead generation campaign to boost enrollment and leverage the exposure of the national awareness campaign for a cost of $10K.
The #MoveAheadWithAdultEd campaign provides a national brand to elevate awareness of adult education and help adult learners locate providers within their area. To date, it has elevated the capacity of the more than 500 schools who utilize the campaign toolkit to raise awareness and recruit adult learners through social media engagement and public relations. As “proud partners” of the #MoveAheadWithAdultEd, these schools tapped into the free toolkit to build their local brands, while leveraging the national exposure from the $120K Google Ads Sponsorship. Momentum continues to build in the national awareness campaign through the Google Ads which educate adult learners on their education and training options with providers throughout the nation.
For the schools who added a localized lead generation campaign at $10K to garner at least 100 qualified leads for conversion to enrollments, they now have a year-round, customized landing page for recruitment to capture contact information and have generated three times the lead count at more than 300 leads per school within a 6-week time period. This is due in large part because the national awareness campaign has been highly successful, along with the capacity building activities to help adult schools better understand how to recruit in a digital age.