Hermes Award Submission My School DC Category

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Hermes Award Submission My School DC Category 34C: Integrated Marketing Campaign My School DC (MSDC) is the District of Columbia’s common application and lottery for public and public charter schools. The online platform allows families to evaluate information about a plethora of DC schools and apply to up to 12 schools around the city, regardless of where they live — making school choice in the nation’s capital an equitable process. 2018 marked the third year LINK Strategic Partners (LINK) served as MSDC’s strategic communications partner. MSDC and LINK collaborated on an integrated campaign using a mix of high-tech and hightouch approaches, balancing grassroots outreach with traditional and digital ads to reach our target audiences. We were charged with reaching families across all wards, with a priority focus on families in Wards 1, 4, 7, and 8. Wards 1 and 4 have the highest number of non-English speaking households (mostly comprised of Spanish and Amharic-speaking families), and therefore may experience an entry barrier to the application process; Ward 7 and 8 are target wards because they have the largest % of families with school-aged kids, and have a lower connectivity rate to broadband access as compared to other wards. We also reflected on our experience from the prior year’s engagement to inform this year’s strategy. For instance, our results the previous year showed that while we met our goals in Wards 1, 4, and 7, we did not meet our goal in Ward 8, coming up short by 4%. As a result, we devoted a larger part of 2018’s digital advertising budget and devoted more attention to our field work in Ward 8 to ensure families got the information they need to make informed decisions for their children, and we were very happy with the number of families reached! Our outreach objectives were as follows: • • • • •

Reach low-information families, especially in our target Wards: 1, 4, 7, and 8 Promote EdFEST, the District’s annual school fair; the My School DC website; and the My School DC hotline Increase awareness of the lottery process in Wards 1, 4, 7, and 8 Create a sense of urgency around lottery deadlines in Wards 1, 4, 7, and 8, with an increased focus on Wards 7 and 8, as well as Spanish-speaking families Procure the best collection of community partners we could find to reach each of our target audiences

Our research informed a multi-pronged strategy, encompassing high-touch and high-tech strategies. Our grassroots efforts focused heavily on Ward 7 and 8 families. Our team hired onthe-ground canvassers to collect information from families who were interested in learning more about, or participating in, the lottery. Our phone banking team then called each of these contacts to remind them of deadlines and provide application support. These grassroots efforts also included teams who participated in various education and community events around the city to spread awareness about the lottery and help families with their applications. Through established Hermes Award Submission – MSDC

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partnerships with community-based organizations that already worked with the families and communities whom we were trying to reach, we were able to participate in various events that helped us engage with different segments of our audiences. Our team also held office hours at two partner locations every week to ensure families had a physical location to visit for help. To ensure we reached families who may be applying to pre-kindergarten – the only grade that requires a lottery application – our team purchased a mailing database of families who reside in our target wards that may have a two, three, or four-year-old in their households. We sent them a postcard to promote EdFEST, the lottery application deadlines, and where to access the application. We also called these families to provide them with information about the process. Additionally, we created an online toolkit for schools and community partners that provides messaging and other materials for them to use through their communications channels. The Google Drive repository of resources, which includes items such as flyers and social media content, could be used by partners to disseminate information about EdFEST and the lottery process to their respective communities. We then created materials that guide families through the lottery application process, such as an easy-to-read 6-page booklet and school directory that explain important parts of the processes like researching schools, creating an online family account, applying to selective high schools, and more. This booklet is translated into five languages that reflect the most non-English languages spoken in the District — Spanish, Amharic, Chinese French, and Vietnamese. These were distributed at various events that our grassroots team participated in, at school open house events, and online through the website. We planned our traditional ad buys based on key data points that we knew about our audiences. We know most of the target audiences live in the eastern part of the city, so we chose to advertise in outlets that would best reach them, such as hyperlocal publications like the Washington Informer and East of the River, and local TV station Fox 5 (based on viewer concentration data in our target wards). We also chose to advertise in Spanish-speaking outlets such as the radio station El Zol and community newspaper El Tiempo Latino. In addition, based on our review of audience data, we strategically chose rail stations and bus routes in which to advertise on public transportation. Our digital strategy prioritized multiple tactics. These included: o Balancing carefully crafted paid, organic, and planned digital content highlighting key events and offerings. o Ensuring all posts were accompanied by strategically selected photographs of students and schools to encourage engagement and attract the eyes of our followers. o Planning a targeted paid strategy to access previously hard-to-reach residents (specifically by varying the language used in messaging and targeting by geographic locations, such as Wards 7 and 8). o Engaging directly with the key influencers and thought leaders in strategically selected communities to encourage buy-in and build conversation. These influencers included community-based organizations and other neighborhood hubs where our key target audiences receive services or regularly gather. Hermes Award Submission – MSDC

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o Meeting online users where they are, whether they were searching for resources through Google Search advertisements or targeting them through Facebook ads. o Integrating planned social media messaging into the monthly content calendars or posting organically from activations or events, in an effort to make schools My School DC ambassadors, by launching specific and equitable call-outs and highlighting their achievements. Every week, our core team, comprised of the engagement expert from My School DC and communications, grassroots engagement, and social media managers from Team LINK, met to discuss various data points. This allowed us to collectively monitor and assess our overall progress to infer how closely we were tracking towards our success metrics and to determine next steps to nimbly course correct and implement new strategies if a strategy was not working statistically. Our marketing strategies for the 2018-2019 school year were very successful, exceeding the client’s expectations. Through our overall efforts, we saw an increase of 3,000 lottery applications from last year (as compared to the year prior which saw an increase of 842 applications), as well as a 2% increase in applications submitted in Ward 8, while the number of applications for Wards 1, 4, and 7 remained consistent with last year. Our canvassing team exceeded our goals for collecting contacts from our target wards by 10%, with most of the contacts coming from Ward 7 and 8 families. The CTR for the Ward 7 and 8-focused digital ads were higher (14.33%), indicating that this audience found our ads more relevant, and possibly engaged more with digital media than other parts of the city. The average CTR of our entire campaign during this period was 9.74%, well above the industry average of 1%. Overall, our integrated approach to this campaign provided us the foundation for success for future campaigns.

Hermes Award Submission – MSDC

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