Ashley Etchison, Director of Strong Workforce Strategic Communications and Marketing for the Inland Empire Desert Region Consortium, joins Interact President Cheryl Broom for an in-depth discussion about the development of their highly-successful “Ready” brand and viewbook, and how Etchison calculates ROI to drive stakeholder buy-in across the Inland Empire’s 12 different community colleges.
Ashley Etchison, Director of Strong Workforce Strategic Communications and Marketing for the Inland Empire Desert Region Consortium, joins Interact President Cheryl Broom for an in-depth discussion about the development of their highly-successful “Ready” brand and viewbook, and how Etchison calculates ROI to drive stakeholder buy-in across the Inland Empire’s 12 different community colleges.
Marketing for community colleges is tough, but after 20 years of working solely with two year technical and community colleges, we've learned a few things. Now we want to share them with you. Welcome to the community college marketing masterclass podcast. If you're looking for expert insights from industry experts and you've come to the right place, bringing more than two decades of marketing and communications experience, please welcome your host and interact communications President Cheryl Broom.
Cheryl Broom:Welcome to the Community College Marketing MasterClass, a podcast dedicated entirely to discussing topics important to community college professionals. I'm Cheryl Broom, president of Interact Communications. I'm thrilled to introduce you to this week's guest, Ashley Etchison. Ashley is the director of strong workforce strategic communications and marketing for the Inland Empire Desert Regional Consortium. In this role, Ashley is responsible for overseeing the consortium strategic communications and outreach projects. This includes designing and implementing an integrated brand for 12 community colleges and what is key here is that these 12 colleges are not part of one district. Many of these 12 are actually direct competitors. Ashley has done an amazing job of uniting and these colleges under one brand and developing marketing media relations and community education programs to position them as the preferred local providers of affordable high quality job training education. Ashley, thank you for joining me today.
Ashley Etchison:Thank you for having me.
Cheryl Broom:So for a lot of our listeners, this concept of a community college consortium is completely foreign. Can you tell us a little bit about what the consortium is? How it started with the goals are?
Ashley Etchison:Sure. So the Inland Empire Desert Regional Consortium consist of the 12 colleges in the Inland Empire with the focus on our career education programs. Actually every region in California has a consortium, I believe there's nine total. So ours is the 12 colleges in the inland empire. And again, the focus is on the promotion of career education.
Cheryl Broom:So for people across the country, I know I've talked to some colleges in New York who are in rural areas, spread out like you are like your environment is. And this whole concept of competitor colleges coming together to form one campaign just seems like completely daunting. How has that worked? How did it get started and, and how have you managed it?
Ashley Etchison:Sure. So the Inland Empire Desert Regional Consortium or we call them IEDRC. They decided when the strong workforce funding came down from the chancellor's office, that started about three years ago, it was$500 million allocation in the state budget. Each consortium got what was a regional allocation and a local allocation. The purpose of the regional allocation was to develop programs that brought colleges together and supported career education and increased enrollments, degree attainment, job wages and things along those lines. And our colleges realized that our career education marketing wasn't really where it needed to be. It's a different message I think for our potential students and the students that are entering into our career education programs. So our 12 deans on our steering committee decided that they wanted to invest dollars into actually a focused targeted campaign on career education.
Cheryl Broom:Great. So the money came first?
Ashley Etchison:Yes,
Cheryl Broom:The money came first and then some great ideas followed. So you went out to bid and looking for a partner. And tell me a little bit about that process. How did that work?
Ashley Etchison:We wanted to make sure that it was really a cohesive effort and that we were including voices from all of our colleges. So we developed a marketing committee which consisted of PIOs, marketing people, DSNs, faculty and CTE deans. I can't remember the exact amount of how many people we had. And they were charged with developing this RFP. We utilized a lot of the states career education campaign, what they were doing. We wanted to make sure that we were working together with that and they put together an RFP and submitted it and we had several firms put in proposals and we went through the process of interviewing them and we ended up with Interact and we've been absolutely thrilled since.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah, I know, I know. I should have had a disclosure at the beginning of our conversation that you actually are one of our current clients and that we've had the great opportunity to work with you and to do some fantastic new things around career education. Career Education's a hot topic in California. And like I mentioned before, we have listeners from all over the nation and some states haven't really started doing any sort of separate career education campaigns. Why do you think that now is such a hot time for career education? What is it about our environment and our colleges that make it such a great thing to market in California?
Ashley Etchison:I think it's not just our colleges but it's our economy. We have so many skilled jobs that are going unfilled, they're good paying jobs. We took career education out of our high schools a long time ago. We really downplayed it in our colleges and there was a lot of focus on transfer, which is great and fantastic. But I think career education was neglected and our CTE programs got a little bit neglected and I think we felt the hurt from that. And we had a lot of skilled jobs going unfilled that are good paying jobs that are going to set our students up for life. And California decided that we needed to invest back into our career education students and that's where the strong workforce dollars came from. And it's been so successful, they're going to also allocate K12 strong workforce dollars because they see the need to get our students into these jobs.
Cheryl Broom:Fantastic. So you had this open RFP process, a really defined set of goals. You want to promote career education at your 12 colleges. What were the next steps? What did you do next to start developing a campaign and a brand?
Ashley Etchison:Of course. So working with Interact, we really realized that we didn't want to do anything unless we had the research and the data behind it. Working with such a large region and so many colleges and stakeholders, we had to have the proof that we were going in the right direction. So we started off with research, qualitative and quantitative research. We did focus groups on 10 of our campuses. We did internal and external surveys. 500 phone calls were made all the way from Blythe down to Temecula to make sure that every single voice was heard in our region and really took that information and narrowed it down into the brand that we have today. And what's really great about it is it just was overwhelmingly accepted. Everybody loved it, the ready career education at your community college. It's versatile, it can be co branded, the bold black and white colors are noticeable. And the best part about the whole thing is if anybody said any questions about it, we had an entire report of data that we can hand to them and say this is why this worked. We have a very unique region, we're very large and expansive. Our colleges are far apart and not only are they far apart but they're very unique and we have Riverside County, San Bernardino County and our desert community and I like to think of it as a venn diagram and we had to find that perfect little center where everything overlapped to find that brand that spoke to all of our colleges and our potential students. And when we did the research we did find a vast difference. And thankfully the brand that Interact came up for us really did speak to everybody.
Cheryl Broom:For those listening. If you want to take a look at the brand and some of the work that's been done by the consortium, you can go to readysetcareer.org and take a look at the ready brand and all the colleges participating.
Ashley Etchison:Definitely.
Cheryl Broom:And I remember one thing that came across from the research was this term ready appeared. No matter who we talk to, people we're saying we're ready for a career, we're ready to go to school, we're ready for a job. And it just organically came out of the research. It really resonated with the community.
Ashley Etchison:It was super cool. It was in every single focus group. We did this word, just like you said, it came out organically from the participants in the focus group. It was really exciting to see that turn into the brand.
Cheryl Broom:And really exciting that 12 different colleges were like, yeah, let's do this. We like it. We believe in the research. We've got our brand now let's move forward.
Ashley Etchison:Yes.
Cheryl Broom:So after the research was done and the overall kind of communication plan was formed, what were the next steps?
Ashley Etchison:Implementation. Right. We had to create the graphical treatments. One thing that was really important to our region was featuring our students. We wanted to show inland empire students. I think it's really important that they see themselves in these ads and that means covering our entire geographical area. We took some fantastic photography, did videos on our campuses, we had our students telling their stories and I think it was really effective and I think the view show how effective that was because it wasn't canned footage. We didn't pull it from iStock. You could see our students in the photography and in the videos.
Cheryl Broom:One of the strategies that you used and have used really well is youtube. Tell me a little bit about what's worked well for that campaign.
Ashley Etchison:Youtube has been overwhelmingly successful. I was blown away by it. We knew that we wanted to tell our students stories and we want it to be authentic narration. So we had our colleges help us identify a couple of students with some really great stories. We filmed them on their work site. We filmed them on their campus and in a couple of cases in their homes and we told the complete picture of the student. The videos turned out really well. And one thing that was really a big surprise to us is our Spanish speaking video was actually the most successful as of today or a couple of days ago. We are over a million views on that video. We had initially decided not to do any collateral in Spanish because you know, our adult ed partners are doing fantastic job of that. But we wanted to make sure we were reaching out to all of our stakeholders. And one of our stakeholders is parents and we wanted to do a video that really spoke to our first generation students. And so we interviewed a wonderful woman named Elizabeth and she told her story about her mother really encouraged her to go to culinary school, was behind her every step of the way. And we interviewed her faculty and they talked about her. But what I think was most touching about the video, it was we went to their home and we filmed them cooking together. And you could just see the passion and the love that was there. And that video has been wildly successful. So I think it shows a need in the market for more information like that.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. Not only has the video been fantastic with the view rate, but the cost of the video that's been amazing. So it's what a penny per completed view,
Ashley Etchison:Penny per completed view, far below industry average, which is super exciting.
Cheryl Broom:So we're here at cc pro, which we, which we haven't said yet at the during the podcast, but Ashley and I are actually sitting in a breakout room talking about the campaign and she presented today about how to use ROI, how to tell your story, your return on investment to your college and your stake holders and some of the things that you shared in the presentation today were stacking up your campaign against industry metrics. Talk a little bit about how you've been doing that, how you've been tracking it in ways that you've shown your stakeholders that this has been a good investment.
Ashley Etchison:So one thing I learned very early on is having this many stakeholders with this many different backgrounds is trying to show ROI is extremely difficult. And we all know with marketing it's almost impossible to say, yes, absolutely this enrollment was due to this campaign. But I found that that's what our stakeholders wanted, they want to know that of course, you know, we want to make sure you're being a good stewards of our funding and we want to show that this campaign is actually working. So we had to think a bit outside of the box. It couldn't just be, you know, we had 3 million impressions from this particular strategy or tactic. So we had to figure out a better way to show it to our stakeholders. Comparing them to industry averages I think is a fantastic way to do that. With our youtube videos are average view rate is 45% and from what I understand, the education videos, it's around 10% so that shows that these videos are resonating with the audiences and they are watching them. And that's huge above industry average. So showing those kind of metrics really kind of got people into that frame of mind that yes, these ads are speaking to people, they are enjoying them and they are working.
Cheryl Broom:One of the great things I love about working on this campaign is that we able to build a landing page that was really specific to what we wanted students to do. So we're not sending students to a college homepage where they have a thousand different options and can't find the information they need. We really developed, based on the research and what students were telling us they wanted, we developed a page that's specific to getting students to the right place and that's been something that you've monitored a lot as well. Tell me a little bit about about that landing page. What's on it, how's it organized? How are you showing the colleges their ROI? Very unique and I don't want go on and on and on the landing page, but it is really unique because it is 12 colleges, one page, so it had the potential of being kind of a nightmare.
Ashley Etchison:Absolutely.
Cheryl Broom:But instead it's streamlined and really nicely done.
Ashley Etchison:I think I'm a firm believer in landing pages. Now you absolutely have to have a landing page to make sure that you're monitoring and your click through rates and all that good stuff. So with the landing page, we wanted to make sure that it wasn't a site where people had to click around a lot or they would get lost in it because the goal is not to have them hang out on this page. Our overall goal is to drive traffic to the colleges to CCC applies that we're getting students enrolled into the campuses. So we wanted to make it simple but really aesthetically pleasing. And we also wanted to give a place for students to kind of do a little bit of background research too. You know, what programs do our colleges offer, what programs might be of interest to them, let them know what kind of jobs are out there, what kind of wages they can get from these programs. And once they kind of drill down from there, they can easily click apply now to the college website or they can go directly to the college website to dig a little bit deeper. But it's really simple, really pretty to navigate.
Cheryl Broom:Wonderful. Yeah. I encourage anybody to take a look at it. It's a readysetcareer.org. Like I said, 12 different colleges came together to create one easy page to use and it's a great tool for students to get them where they want to go.
Ashley Etchison:Absolutely.
Cheryl Broom:So fantastic landing page. Ashley did a good job on organizing that.
Ashley Etchison:And it's great to show our campuses how many clicks they're getting, how many clicks are going directly to their site and how many clicks are going to CCC apply.
Cheryl Broom:So you've got this campaign going, you've done pay per click, you've done youtube, geo fencing, radio, Pandora, and you still get asked, you know, you have all these fantastic numbers, how many impressions and how many clicks and how many phone calls you're tracking. But you still get asked how many enrollments, what's the ROI and how have you been answering that?
Ashley Etchison:So Roy keeps me up at night because I have to show numbers. We work in education, academia, they want to see numbers and they want to see proof that this campaign is actually working. So when we were looking at the website analytics, and we did an entire year to your campaign, February, 2018 to February, 2019 was a full running year. We had a total of 1,544 clicks on apply now, which is fantastic, but it still didn't tell a big, the picture didn't show ROI because we don't know if those students actually enrolled. So what I did is I looked at the average enrollment numbers and percentages and so I'm going to do a little math here, so stick with me. So let's assume 80% of those 1,544 students actually apply, which seems about right. So that gives us about 1,235 students left and say 60% of those students enroll. And that's pretty typical for all of our colleges to have about half or a little more than half actually enroll into courses. We have a lot of students that we lose in that process. So now we're down to about 741 so if these students only attended part time or half enrolled full time, we're down about 370 FTEs or full time equivalent status. Now if I look at that and say and just multiply that by the base allocation from the funding formula, which is 5,547 we have a return on investment of over$2 million, which is well over what we spent on the campaign and to me shows fantastic ROI. Now I can't prove those numbers, I can't identity, you know, add student numbers to that to definitely show you that they came from our campaign. But I've been extremely conservative with those numbers and using the average percentages we have from our colleges. I feel comfortable saying that, yes, this campaign has absolutely given us a large return on investment.
Cheryl Broom:And I love that formula because you can also work at backwards.
Ashley Etchison:Right.
Cheryl Broom:You can say, okay, my budget and my college is$100,000 and I know our base allocation is, and let's just, I'm just going to round it down for easy math,
Ashley Etchison:Right.
Cheryl Broom:...is 5,000 so if I spend$100,000 and I divide it by 5,000 then what does that 20 students, I need 20 students to enroll full time to be able to say that the investment broke even.
Ashley Etchison:Right.
Cheryl Broom:So it's a really great formula to have in your back pocket and I think you can nail that down at colleges even more specifically. It just, you know, working with your business offices, seeing what your base allocation is. This isn't even including supplemental allocations, which is going to be different between students and colleges and districts. So you can look at the numbers from Your Business Office and try to get an idea of what yours would be. Of course, it's always going to be a moving target. It's not specific necessarily, but it's a good way to just at least put a number to it. Right. Fantastic. So for those of you listening out there, Ashley has cracked the code. Um, at least at least started to think about, and it's a fantastic way. And before we were recording, we were chatting that this is the way the businesses calculate an ROI in terms of marketing and our colleges should start thinking that way as well.
Ashley Etchison:Absolutely. Especially with the new metrics that we're all going to be held to. We have to show that what we're doing is producing outcomes. We need to show that we have outcomes. And again, because we want to be good stewards of our funding, we want to make sure that we're spending it in the right places.
Cheryl Broom:Now speaking of outcomes, a lot of what the campaign has done has been digital, but you also decided to make a print piece that United all 12 colleges together. And that's something can't really measure.
Ashley Etchison:Right.
Cheryl Broom:But it has done fantastic for you. So tell me a little bit about the view book it just won best in the country at NCMPR.
Ashley Etchison:So excited about that.
Cheryl Broom:Really exciting. Tell me what that was about and how you got that accomplished.
Ashley Etchison:So the viewbook was a really fun project that we did. Initially people said, oh, view books are dead. Nobody are using those anymore. Don't bother doing that. But our region felt that it is something that we wanted to do for our high schools. So we wanted to develop a really beautiful piece that showcased our programs visually for our high school students and potential students. So there is a difference in sectors between the California Department of Education, Our k 12 students and our community colleges. So we had a long discussion about how we were going to bridge that because since we were giving it to our high school students, we wanted them to know the sectors and understand it. So it's divided into the CDE sectors. But in there we wanted to make sure they knew how that translated to the college, right, and what programs they could actually take. So we have the names that they're familiar with that underneath we put the college program names and then we put the jobs and wages because we wanted them to see that clear connection between the jobs and the wages. The viewbook was overwhelmingly successful. We sent two to every high school in our region and we got a lot of fantastic feedback. We had counselors writing us saying, I'm going to be sharing this with my students. We'd love more copies. It really helped us bridge that gap between us and our high schools and it kind of opened up communication and they said, yes, please send us more. We want information.
Cheryl Broom:I really like the view book too because it's sells the field in addition to the program.
Ashley Etchison:Right.
Cheryl Broom:So if a student says, well Gosh I, I'm interested in health, but I don't really know what I'm interested in that piece, you can open it up to that spread and you can see all the different types of programs, different types of careers, how much money you can possibly make. So it gives you a broader picture than just take this class and take this class.
Ashley Etchison:Right.
Cheryl Broom:It really helps guide students into making a good decision.
Ashley Etchison:Definitely.
Cheryl Broom:So the viewbook sounds like it was a little bit of a surprise.
Ashley Etchison:It was, I think, yes.
Cheryl Broom:Anything else that was surprising as you've gone through now you've completed a year. Any other surprises?
Ashley Etchison:That's a tough one. I mean, to be honest, I think the entire campaign was a bit of a surprise. I don't want to say I went into it being a pessimist or anything. I knew it would be successful, but I think the extent it was successful was surprising to see our youtube video to be over a million views, especially after being out for over six months. You'd think they'd get tired of it, but they're still watching it and they still want more. So just the numbers in general have been a bit of a surprise and very exciting and looking forward to continue it and honestly learned a lot about data and about campaigns and the importance of keeping them going and not stopping is really, really important.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah. That was something that you talked about in your presentation today, that you learned the lesson to not start and stop digital campaigns.
Ashley Etchison:Yes, you lose your momentum and they start charging more.
Cheryl Broom:Yeah, her cost per thousand went up dramatically when you stopped and started it and unfortunately sometimes the budget calls for that.
Ashley Etchison:Right. Absolutely.
Cheryl Broom:You have to cut back. But we learned don't do that with Geo fencing.
Ashley Etchison:Yes. Keep it going. Keep the Geo fencing going.
Cheryl Broom:Well Great. You know, I've had calls from colleges throughout the country that are interested in doing some of the same things that you're doing. Do you have any guiding tips for them as they form their own consortiums or look at partnering with other colleges?
Ashley Etchison:I think what was one of the best things that we did from the very beginning, and I got this advice from actually consortium up north is get everybody in the same room from the beginning. And we did that with our marketing committee and as well as working with our local PIOs and bringing them into the conversation early because they're the subject matter experts. They know their colleges, they know their region and having their input and their advice was just instrumental to getting this moving and getting it off the ground. So the more of a team effort you can make it the better. I mean we really are stronger together and we pool our resources. We can do great things.
Cheryl Broom:Well, great. Well thank you so much Ashley. It's always such a pleasure to talk to you and for those of you listening, if you go to readysetcareer.org you can see all the great work that the Inland Empire Desert Regional Consortium has done and take a look around, leave a comment for Ashley.
Ashley Etchison:Please do. I'd love it!
Cheryl Broom:And it's been great. Thank you so much.
Ashley Etchison:Thank you. I appreciate it Cheryl.
Cheryl Broom:And that wraps up this episode of Community College Marketing MasterClass. Thank you so much for joining us and I look forward to next time.
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