Hi-Point Journeys | Inside a High School Social Media Campaign, Part 3

The campaign is about three weeks old now and here are some results:

• 154 fans (and growing) on the Facebook Fan Page.
  
• Front page story in The Bellefontaine Examiner, our school's official newspaper of record. The story was pitched actually through social media as well after the reporter who covers our school district started became a friend on my Facebook page and "Liked" the campaign
• The actual micro-site, which hosts all the social media elements and serves as our "hub" of the campaign has had about 600 visits so far
• The interaction on the Facebook Fan Page has been pretty good. We have had teachers, parents and students making comments, "Liking" posts and links and it seems to be more of the "hub" of the campaign than the actual micro-site
• We have had a few comments on the blog (moderated, of course), mostly from family members of the bloggers. I have also had several SPAM posts that have been "unapproved for publishing"

How are we promoting the campaign? This is where traditional promotion comes into play. Our recruiting coordinator and our student ambassadors visit our 14 partner school districts each year during September and October to present to the sophomores on our school and the program options. So far, they have visited about half of the schools. This is one way where we are communicating about this. What is the full promotion plan? Here's a look:

• One-on-one and Face-to-face: Our student ambassadors, which include our 10 student bloggers, are talking directly to our main target audience, the sophomores, during school visits, passing out a special sell-sheet, which provides information on the campaign
• Sell-Sheet: A special sell-sheet was designed by our agency, Springboard 360 Marketing, to promote the campaign
• Contests & Giveaways: If the sophomores become a fan of our Facebook Fan Page and post on our wall what they want their "Hi-Point Journey to be," they are entered into a drawing to take place during our main recruiting event, an open house and career preview night. The event, held in November after all school visits and our Sophomore Career Days tours, allows the students to get inside the labs and have time with the instructors. Many apply that night with their parents present. Our hope is the contest (which is giving away an iPod Touch and Flip Cam) will entice them to attend the event, but will also allow for some measurable interaction on one of the social media channels
• TV Commercials: One of our school's 1978 graduates, who was inducted into our distinguished alumni hall of fame last May, happens to own a production studio in Columbus, Ozone Studios. Leveraging this new-found relationship allowed us to produce great new TV spots and a two-minute web video using the actual student bloggers to talk about their Hi-Point experiences. The commercials were produced in a "raw" and transparent and authentic look and feel that lends itself to this campaign
• Direct Mail: In a couple of weeks every parent and sophomore will receive a special invitation in the mail promoting the open house and career preview night and the Hi-Point Journeys Campaign. I am hoping this will yield measurable results in seeing more prospective students following along and more parents following along. The mailer will include a card that the students can bring to the open house and career preview night, which will allow them to get into our Expo area for free. This area is where local restaurants do menu tastings (The event is actually called "A Taste of the Future"). The card will also get them a free Hi-Point Journeys t-shirt. The mailer will include one card for the student and one for their parents or a friend
• T-Shirts: High school students love, love, love free t-shirts for whatever reason, so why not make prospective students (and their parents) walking billboards advertising the Hi-Point Journeys Campaign. Our campaign logo is on the front. On the back, "Follow the journey: hipointjourneys.com"
• Social Media Promotion: Of course, since our district already has existing social media outposts, we have been pushing the campaign on our Twitter, Facebook Page and YouTube Channel
• New Website: Our district launched a new website at the same time we launched this campaign. The new website has all of our social media outposts integrated into the front page. The Hi-Point Journeys Campaign is also featured prominently throughout the new website, which receives on average around 900 unique visits per day

Your comments and suggestions are appreciated. Do you have any ideas how to better promote this campaign? Do you have any ideas about how we should be engaging with our followers? Feel free to comment here.

Next time, I will blog about issues that have come up, problems we have had and give you some measurement of the campaign so far.

Hi-Point Journeys | A Look Inside a High School Social Media Campaign, Part 2

Last week I introduced you to my school district's social media campaign, Hi-Point Journeys. This week, actually today, the campaign was fully launched! Thursday I was asked to present on social media at Buckeye Career Center in New Philadelphia, Ohio, to a consortium of career-technical marketers and recruiters. I presented the Hi-Point Journeys Campaign to them. While they seemed amazed at this innovative campaign, there were lots of questions (as expected). Schools are weary of social media because of the lack of control and the so-called "dangers" associated with being on the internet and engaged in social networking. So, of course, many questions they asked, and many questions I always get asked, have to do with what safety precautions we have taken for this campaign. Here's how we are managing the campaign, allowing students to participate and being mindful of how being involved in social media could backfire:

Campaign Management:

• A blogging schedule was developed for the students to follow so they know what weeks they have to write a blog entry
• Topics were developed focusing on the talking points and messaging we wanted to get across to prospective students and parents. These topics have to do with the students' life at Ohio Hi-Point, not their personal lives. Even though some may say that this isn't "true" social media since I have developed the topics, I don't limit what they write about or edit their entries beyond fixing some grammatical and mechanical errors. Also, there are many weeks where they are able to write about whatever they want, as long as it is related to school and student life
• When the students aren't assigned to blog, they are responsible for taking pictures and filming video. They have more freedom here, but in the training meeting, I took the opportunity to teach them about appropriate social networking and appropriate use of the cameras. I am a proponent that schools should be teaching appropriate use of social media instead of trying to deny its existence
• All photos, videos and blog entries filter through me first before they are posted. While I would love for the students to have access to the different outposts to post their own contributions, there are still a lot of problems that could result from this, so for now, I manage all of the postings

Student Participation:

• The 10 students were chosen by our Recruiting Coordinator, since she works more closely with the students. Each student is an "ambassador," meaning they applied, were interviewed and were selected by staff to serve the school district as tour guides, in recruiting events and as community ambassadors. They go out to our partner schools during the recruiting season and present to 8th graders and sophomores
• The students and their parents signed a contract related to the campaign, understanding that any poor choices related to their blogging, photos, use of equipment, videos, etc. would fall under the same consequences related to poor behavior in the classroom or in the school, and they could be punished appropriately
• The reward for completing the 10 month project? They will get to keep their digital cameras and the FlipCams. Total investment for us: Less than $5,000
• Students and parents sign two documents every year, as well, including our "Acceptable Use of Technology Agreement" related to activity on the internet and on school computers and equipment. They also sign a form giving us permission to use their images for marketing purposes

Being Mindful:

• I said to my colleagues at Buckeye Career Center that they would be using this campaign as either a case study FOR social media in their schools or AGAINST social media in their schools. I am aware, as is our administration, that this is experimental. Using students to tell our story isn't a new concept, but doing it in such a full-scale fashion on many different internet platforms, on TV commercials, in recruiting visits, in print collateral, and allowing prospective students and parents to engage with these students, is relatively new, at least in Ohio. This could all backfire, so it is a lot of work to be mindful of constantly monitoring and making sure that it is working and that the students are protected

Thoughts? Next time, I will take you inside how we are promoting the campaign and trying to engage prospective students and parents and others.

In the meantime, the campaign is launched now, so you can visit all the elements from our Hi-Point Journeys Microsite and find all of the social media this campaign is utilizing.

Hi-Point Journeys: A Look at a High School Social Media Campaign, Part 1

I am excited, and I am nervous. My school district and the marketing and communications department (which like most schools in Ohio, at least, is just me!) is finally putting social media into action. My school district began using social media in 2008 for communications purposes. We have a presence on Twitter, Facebook (259 fans and growing), Delicious, Flickr, YouTube and utilize blogging in several ways. However, this time, we are using social media as a tool of engagement, recruiting and overall outreach, and yes, we are using high school students to do it.
I have blogged several times about the challenges of using social media in a school district. Public records, legal challenges, media scrutiny, lack of control, fear of the unknown, dangers of the Internet and more have led schools to have to tread lightly when it comes to the full-scale embrace of this shift in ways to engage, communicate and reach our constituents. But after much research, planning, discussions and working with a great company to help bring the campaign to life, I am happy to say that my district is fully embracing it and is going to be using social media in a full-scale marketing campaign to engage and recruit students and engage and communicate with parents.
Let me introduce you to Hi-Point Journeys. 10 People. 10 Months. One Amazing Journey.

Background: Our school district is a career-technical school district, serving juniors and seniors at 14 partnering school districts in 5 counties. We have nearly 700 students on our main campus in 20 plus programs and in academic courses and serve another 1100 in various "satellite" locations (typically career-tech programs located within our partner schools or at our new South Campus in Urbana). We are a public school district, one of 49 career-technical planning districts in the state of Ohio. However, unlike most public schools in Ohio, we face the challenge each year of having to recruit our student body. Like all public schools, however, we also receive our funding based on the number of students we have enrolled in our programs. So much like colleges, our recruitment begins early and has a process in which we must go through each year in order to reach out to prospects and their parents. While our enrollment has increased over the past 4-5 years, we are still faced with challenges, and we have had problems in consistently reaching out, communicating, following up, telling our real story and engaging prospects.

The Campaign:
As part of our recruitment efforts, Hi-Point Journeys will utilize 10 of our current seniors, in various programs, from various partner schools and from various backgrounds to tell the story of our school, their programs, their senior years and give an inside look into what life is really like as a student in a career-technical program at a career-technical school.
Our 10 students will blog, based on a set schedule I have given them and topic ideas and suggestions, but also about the things they want to blog about.
The 10 students have been given digital cameras to capture photos of their daily experiences and classroom activities and the student life at school. They have each been given their own FlipCams to capture videos in the same respect.
With their words through their blogs and through the images and video they capture, their 10 month journey through their senior year will enable our best asset to tell the school's story in the very authentic and transparent way today's audiences demand.

The Elements:
The Microsite: Developed by Oxiem Marketing Technologies, the microsite will be the "hub" of the campaign, the place where prospects and their parents are directed to visit, and where all of the other elements (including individual profile pages of each blogger) will live and update automatically. It will also link to our website and call the prospects into action with a link to apply or ask more questions.
The Blog: The Hi-Point Journeys blog will host the entries of the 10 students. It will be update nearly every day of the week with a new entry on various topics, allowing these students to tell the story of the school.
The Facebook Fan Page: The 10 students will have their own fan page, a key element in this campaign. Why is it key? This is where some of the measurement and engagement come into play, a big factor in running social media campaigns. We will know success by 1) the number of fans we have, 2) the number of those fans are prospective students and prospective student parents, and 3) the number of prospective students who post "what they want their 'Hi-Point Journey' to be (more on this later on).

The Flickr Page: Photos that the 10 students take with their cameras will be posted on their own Flickr Page.
The YouTube Channel: A special YouTube Channel has been set-up to host the videos they film with their FlipCams, along with the television commercials that were filmed and produced by one of our alumni (more on this later) and other videos I put together for this channel. And you can check out the two-minute web video we are using with some of the bloggers:



This gives you an overview of what the campaign is all about, but I know there are unanswered questions and details left out. Hey, it's a blog post, not a place to post the full, boring campaign plan.
How are we allowing students to be online like this? What safety measures are we taking? What policy and procedures and training are we using for this campaign? How will we promote this to prospective students and their parents? How will we measure the success or failure? How do we know this is actually engaging people and not just wasting time? Why are these 10 students complying, what's in it for them?

I promise. More details in my next blog post. In the meantime, you can fan their page on Facebook, visit their Flickr page and YouTube Channel, but the blogging is just starting this week, pictures have yet to be taken and the FlipCams have not arrived yet, and the microsite is not quite ready. Yes, there are kinks in the plan, and I will write about those later as well.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to leave them here!

School Communications | Build an Army

Controlling the message is key. Leveraging the power of new media to help control that message has never been more vital.
We can see this all over the news right now. Fringe, conservative groups have leveraged the viral power of email blasts, text messaging, blogs and more to mobilize into an effective "army" of rabid and misinformed town hall rioters hell bent on disrupting any logical, rational or real discussion on the important topic of health care reform.
Make no mistake about it. These town hall protesters are the product of a well thought-out campaign on behalf of those whose special interests would be most threatened by any new legislation that reforms health care. I will blog more on this topic later, but I digress for now to focus on education, levies and how the message has been lost as many school districts struggle financially, are forced to turn to taxpayers for new money and are rejected because of rumors, misinformation, poor communication and an overall loss in the game of message control.
The cards are stacked against a school district for the most part. Many school districts, because of previous financial cuts, are often without a school PR person to provide frequent and consistent communications and outreach. But even if there is a school PR person in place, regulations prohibit this employee from working on a levy campaign during school hours. Obviously, then, committees are typically formed, levy campaign consultants are hired, and the traditional methods are utilized: yard signs, flyers, t-shirts with a catchy slogan, door-to-door knocking, newspaper editorials, rallies, endorsements. All viable tactics. But what else can a school district do to build an "army" as passionate as those who stand and campaign against them and decry "No New Taxes!"?
We learned from this past presidential election that people, if engaged, if connected with emotionally, if given a sense of ownership and pride, will turn out and pull off the unthinkable. There is something to be learned from Barack Obama's historic victory in his use of new media strategies and tactics to build an "army" of people, of all ages and backgrounds, who became part of a movement, not just a campaign. In my opinion, this is what is lacking in school levy campaigns. Many times this is simply because the resources have not been there. Now, with social media and the viral, affordable and engaging nature of all of the tools available, I think it is within reach for schools to build an "army" of people passionate enough to grow and spread into a movement and to control the lost message that education IS the beginning of everything else that makes our country, and world, work.
So how do we do it? What tools do we use? What strategies and tactics make sense? I have some ideas, and I will share them in my next post, but I am still waiting to hear your thoughts and to deliberate your ideas! Please share...

School Communications | Breaking the Levies

I don't know about everywhere else in the United States, but in Ohio the word "levy" strikes fear into the hearts of a school district staff. Especially today, in this day and age, when the economy is hurting, job loss is high, and the country is in recession. Even before the current economic conditions, however, schools in Ohio have had to struggle through levy campaigns, where going to the tax payers in their communities is always a challenging situation. Why so challenging?

• Senior citizens dominate the polling places during elections. Most senior citizens within a community no longer have connections to the school, as their children have since graduated and left the community. So why would they want to support the school when they have no connection? While schools have gotten smart enough to engage in senior citizen community engagement, many times there just is not enough resources to do it effectively
  
• Misunderstandings about how much money will be paid in taxes, where the money is going to, and how much school districts get from the state all play key roles. One of the biggest misunderstandings comes from people thinking schools are funded MAINLY from lottery sales. This isn't helped by a horrible advertising and messaging campaign from the Ohio Lottery that claims most of the money made from the lottery goes to schools. False. The Lottery is actually capped within the state education budget as to how much can go to education. There is no increase each year, and the funds are shared amongst nearly 700 school districts throughout the state. My school district, for instance, only receives a little over $700,000 from Lottery funds. Unfortunately, the system is broken, and the majority of school dollars has to come from tax revenues. Period. If people would understand that a community, a town, a cities economic development and health starts with the school district and its students, perhaps people wouldn't have a problem paying their fair share. The message has been lost
• The media has seen success (measured by ratings and newspaper sales) by focusing on a school's problems. From headlines about the teacher and student engaged in improper behaviors to public record requests for credit card receipts to publishing employee salaries and creating the impression that these salaries are high and wasteful of taxpayer dollars. Rarely do we see positive stories about school's and the great things that happen there everyday. Rarely do we see the impact teachers make on the lives of their students or hear about the teacher who manages a classroom of 30 kids (when it should be only 20), then stays after school to coach a sport or advise an extra-curricular for very little pay and gives up time in their lives and with their families to make sure that the students in their schools receive extra help, have positive experiences and excel in activities. This adverse relationship with the media has become a source of warping the view of schools, the teachers and the administration and where money is being spent and what is actually going on inside of a school. Tax payers then think their money is being wasted and nothing positive is happening within a school building. I recognize the media's job is to report the truth and hold institutions accountable, and I believe this is important, but there is a lot of great stories and realities that go untold because it is not "sensational" enough
  
• Geography. Many school districts cover large areas made up of multiple towns and communities, each with their own distinct cultures. Sadly, in this day and age, socioeconomic factors play such a large role in school districts. School districts serving multiple communities, many still upset over consolidations and other changes throughout the year in the way schools operate, face huge hurdles in changing long-standing opinions and rumors and feuds. Typically, what we will see when voting districts publish their results, small and rural communities (typically feeling ignored and slighted by the school) vote in droves against the levies. There is also a huge difference in the communities that are made up of a more "affluent" and "educated" population as opposed to the areas that are more "blue collar." These socioeconomic and geographic factors pose a communication challenge for the districts

So what to do? The school funding structure is unconstitutional. The Ohio Supreme Court has made that clear time and again. So why does our legislature continue to not fix it? And why do we as a society have such a negative view of how school's operate, how much teachers and administrators are paid? Why do we not see that everything begins with how well our school's are doing? Why don't we understand that communities that are economically well-developed and strong are the ones that have excellent school districts (Home sales and property values could be affected in South-Western School District)? Why are levies such a difficult thing for school's to deal with? There are so many issues and factors that have led to an educational crisis in Ohio and it seems to me that there needs to be a large-scale effort to fight back and communicate the facts and what it all means.

The fact is the system will likely never be fixed. Our politicians genuinely could care less about education because the education industry cannot pay their campaigns and provide the perks like the pharmaceutical companies and the giant corporations. Let's face it: education will continue to be ignored by those who can fix it because it does not benefit them to fix it. So what can school's do to flip the script? How can new media be leveraged? How can the message be pushed and go viral so the facts come out? How can all of the positives, which will far outweigh the negatives, come out without having to go through traditional mediums?

Over the next few blog posts, I will offer up my suggestions, show how some school districts and communities are starting to figure this out, and hopefully take your suggestions and ideas. Contribute to the conversation and let me know what you think. Watching the South-Western City Schools levy go down last week (again) and how it went down, watching the students react to the devastating news that their schools would be changed significantly, that people would lose jobs, that extra-curricular activities would be canceled--it made me fed up and sickened (see the listing of the impact here). While we will never overcome the bureaucracy and the corruption that keeps our school systems struggling, we can offer solutions to control the message and maybe begin a movement that helps to ensure that levies pass and students and teachers have the resources they need. Do you have suggestions?