By Jay Crandall, Public Relations Supervisor – Phoenix
One of the most challenging and rewarding parts of public relations is learning to clearly understand a client’s goals and tailoring your outreach to achieve them. That has been especially true for The Ferraro Group as we’ve partnered with Advertising agency Davidson Belluso and the Arizona State Treasurer’s office for its AZ529 Education Savings Program over the last five years.
The Initial Approach
During our early conversations, the AZ529 team focused on securing a variety of media live shots and interviews for events promoting the program. Two of the most high-profile events are an annual essay contest and annual art contest, where students write about or draw their dream job for a chance to win $529 for their own education savings account.
We were highly successful in garnering media attention by offering financial literacy tips, offering Spanish- and English-language spokespeople, as well as creating visually engaging school visits where the Treasurer taught students and led them in STEM or art activities. However, we weren’t seeing the results that mattered most—each contest was bringing in 100 or fewer entries.
Redefining Success
Working with the Treasurer, we took a deep dive into both our strategy and what we really hoped to accomplish with these programs. As we reevaluated our goals, it became clear that our objective wasn’t just media coverage. Higher participation meant more awareness, and more awareness meant more families taking part in the program—which was the true goal all along.
As for strategy, we realized media coverage alone wasn’t raising awareness. We were counting on parents or teachers seeing news reports, then asking schools about the contest or entering their students through our online portal. To really reach our audience, we needed to take our message directly to them.
The New Strategy
We compiled an extensive school contact list that includes superintendents, principals, and teachers in more than 3,500 elementary and middle schools across Arizona. We’ve now built ongoing relationships with the schools and districts including public, private, district, charter and tribal schools, and send all information directly to schools in both English and Spanish. We also continuously outreach throughout the campaign to understand individual school’s questions and roadblocks to entering, especially with high turnover of teachers and educational leaders in some counties. These relationships have led to tailored outreach and operational refinements to how entries are shared and collected. Finally, we created online community connections through parenting, education and neighborhood social media forums and groups to ensure art and essay contest information from the schools was being reinforced for parents and caregivers through multiple communication channels.
The Results
The results speak for themselves. We’ve seen a more than 700 percent increase in the number of contest entries. But more importantly, we’ve seen participation in the program grow significantly:
- 61,208 AZ529 accounts have been opened in the last 60 months
- Assets are up 72.4% in that same timeframe to a new record high of $2.8 billion
Unexpected Benefits
Expanding our contact list to include schools and teachers has led to other benefits as well. Some teachers let us know that email-only entries weren’t always possible for rural students, so we now provide information on how and where to mail entries. Teachers have also suggested providing winning students with award certificates for schools to display—something we’re working on now. Finally, many teachers and schools didn’t know materials and the AZ529 website offered resources in Spanish and Navajo to better meet their students’ needs.
The Lesson
It all started with taking a fresh look at the client’s ultimate goals, being flexible enough to change our strategy, and putting in the work to build and maintain an outreach list and create relationships that most effectively reach the target audience. Sometimes the best media coverage in the world can’t replace direct and ongoing communication with the people who matter most.
