redefinED Atlanta is a nonprofit organization that works to help children throughout the Metro Atlanta area with getting into high-quality schools. Their long-term goal is to help every student in every community gain access to a great K-12 public education.
In an effort to achieve this goal, they turned to Media Cause to help strategize and develop a series of campaigns to increase awareness of their organization and boost support for their cause.
When we began working with the redefinED team, our focus centered on campaign strategy and development. As we completed the Quality Assurance and Discovery processes, we discovered that the organization had foundational brand elements, such as messaging, personas, and digital presence that needed to be revised and tailored before we could start any campaigns.
Before we started any campaign work, we knew we wanted to help the redefinED team determine who their target audiences were and how to communicate to them effectively.
First, we started on redefinED’s brand messaging and target audience development. Once we spoke with the redefinED team, interviewed their 26 stakeholders, and conducted a focus-finder exercise, we found that they wanted to target three types of audiences.
We needed to give these audiences a sense of who redefinED is and why the work they do matters. The most strategic way to do this was to update their online presence so that key individuals would better understand who they were. Based on our Discovery and Persona creation processes, we determined sharp, simple messaging would be the best approach to communicating clearly and effectively with redefinED’s audiences. We did this by building a microsite to help deliver information about redefinED and Atlanta Public Schools to parents, guardians, teachers, community members, advocates, and other nonprofits.
Next, we developed a targeted email welcome series to educate and nurture their target personas. Based on our Discovery and Persona creation processes, we determined sharp, simple messaging would be the best approach to communicating clearly and effectively with redefinED’s audiences.
With the personas defined, we started work on the microsite. Called the “Atlanta Schools Data Project,” this site would feature publicly available data about Atlanta Public Schools (APS) that was easy and accessible for parents and stakeholders. We first developed a wireframe/sitemap for the site to provide visitors with a simple user journey. Once they visited the web page, they could quickly find what they were looking for and process the information.
From there, we created targeted content for (6) key pages:
1. Home
2. How to Use the Data
3. Find Your Data
4. How APS Works
5. Take Action
6. About redefinED
We wanted to deliver clear and compelling copy—making sure it touched on the background of APS, redefinED, and how to use the provided data.
As the microsite came together, we began working on the welcome series. The purpose of this three-part email campaign welcomed new subscribers to redefinED and described what they do and the importance of their work. It had very specific call-to-action that we wanted the audience to take:
Email 1: Included a survey so that redefinED can learn more about them.
Email 2: Told the first-hand experience from a student about their educational journey
Email 3: Asked for their support and a donation
