Overview
Massachusetts Charter Public School Association (also sometimes known as Boston Charter Alliance) is a school membership organization representing over 70 schools throughout the state. Their mission is to ensure that children and families have access to high-quality public schools through advocacy, communications, and best practice sharing and training.
For the last two years, they have partnered with Media Cause to develop and manage their paid media campaigns aimed at increasing the reach of their student recruitment efforts and ultimately bring in school applications from parents looking for high-quality public schools.
Lina Musayev Managing Director, School Supports Massachusetts Charter Public School Association
Massachusetts Public Charter School Association is a membership organization that often operates behind-the-scenes. They have a relatively small brand presence, limited budget, and not much marketing activity throughout the year.
They wanted to increase awareness about the application process and inform parents on what makes charter schools different in order to drive applications.
Our campaign was designed to reach parents in the Boston area and drive student enrollment applications.
To achieve this goal, we focused the media investment on the top-performing channels from the past year’s campaign. Self-serve advertising platforms of Facebook and Google Ads allowed us to achieve targeted audience reach while enabling us to make campaign optimizations quickly during a key and highly competitive period of school enrollment.
Based on our learnings from the previous year, we developed a 4-month campaign for paid media. We chose Facebook and Google Ads as self-service platforms for their ability to target and optimize based on both brand awareness and conversion goals. Moreover, we knew that retargeting would be critical to drive increased attention for parents unfamiliar with the opportunity that Boston charter public schools represent. Lastly, we increased the urgency during the month of February through creative tweaks and countdown verbiage.
Our approach to the creative was bright colors, positive language focused on child outcomes, realistic portraits of kids in schools, and multilingual copy to ensure our ads were reaching Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish speakers.
We built out a four-part reporting dashboard that connected directly to Google Ads and Facebook, including narrative insights on a regular basis, with monthly check-ins to review performance.
We optimized regularly based on which ads were performing the best in terms of conversions and impressions, at times pausing ads that were underperforming in order to boost spend for the most successful variations of copy and graphics.
As usual, we included a full campaign wrap-up report in March, drawing on the results, key learnings, and recommendations for future opportunities and growth.
