A Growth Marketer, A Special-Needs School District, & COVID-19 Part 1: Access
CBS New York: Coronavirus Update: New York Now Has Highest Number Of Cases In The Country; New Rochelle Gets State’s 1st Drive-Through Testing Site
Part 1: A Scramble To Student Access
The day the governor of New York shut down the state my mom had to figure out how to bring four special needs schools online almost overnight.
For context, Dr. McGuffog’s job is hard on a normal day. Adolescent special needs students running away from campus, violence in the classroom, budget cuts, teacher protests... that’s basically a Tuesday for her. And yet, she’s still my mom and when I call she always starts by asking how my day was. I can complain about imperfect clients, a co-worker who cc’d the wrong partner, or god-forbid a crashed website. Then she’ll tell me something like, the school went on lockdown because a student brought a weapon on campus. To put it bluntly, my mom’s daily struggles make the worst challenges we face in the e-commerce world look like a joke.
And then our worlds collided. When the school shut down and the district had to go online overnight my mom called her longest-standing IT guy. The kid who found out how to pass her AOL parental guidance settings when he was five. The kid who helps her “get the Google to work.” Also, the kid who grew up to help build the international stack architecture for some of the largest brands and holding companies in the world.
All of a sudden my mom, a woman who can solve any problem in her domain, was facing a problem that actually fell in my area of expertise, and the stakes had never been higher.
Despite excitement by educators and administrators to integrate education into the classroom education has been described as a graveyard of technical innovation. One of the main reasons for this is that there is an inherent (and necessary) separation between the technology provider and the end user. Here’s an example of what many school district technology purchasing processes look like.
Anybody in education technology will tell you this sales and adoption cycle is a nightmare and can take years. When COVID-19 hit, and every school district and government agency went into emergency mode, we faced a unique moment in history where many of those barriers blew up in what the World Economic Forum and many others are calling The Great Reset. What previously took years would have to be done remotely within days.
The Great Reset didn’t just happen in education. It happened in healthcare, in grocery, in retail... It happened everywhere. I’m highlighting education because the transition was so stark and immediate in a space with massive consequences. A space that directly impacts our greatest resources, our kids.
So here’s how it went down...
At first it was chaos. There were so many problems firing at once. Kids with autism who didn’t have housing in a pandemic, students who would go hungry without school lunch, extended members of the community getting sick in a very real public health crisis, and no funding to address any of these unprecedented issues.
Mind you, this school district is right next to New Rochelle, the earliest epicenter of the pandemic. It’s hard to remember back to the beginning, but the National Guard was deployed into New Rochelle before the government shut down the schools. Students in my mom’s schools live in New Rochelle; other students are friends with kids who live in New Rochelle. This was all happening in real-time. As Governor Cuomo put it, we were the guinea pigs that the whole country would watch, and a special education public school district where the vast majority of students live below the poverty line and 80% are people of color, is possibly the most vulnerable and overlooked community I can think of.
… a special education public school district where the vast majority of students live below the poverty line and 80% are people of color, is possibly the most vulnerable and overlooked community I can think of.
Sometimes when we launch a new website or tech stack in the world of e-commerce we use phrases like “war room” and “in the trenches.” As a quick aside... stop doing that. Commerce is not war. Lost sales are not the same as lost lives. Don’t make launching a website more than what it is. It doesn’t actually help improve performance.
In this instance, lives really were on the line. For these students, these schools are the last stop before they truly fall through the cracks. Kids with severe learning and emotional disabilities. Kids that our society has tossed aside in many regards. Kids with so much raw potential. If we lose them in the middle of a pandemic... if we lose this school... those kids have nowhere to go.
With so many problems to focus on we chose to focus our attention on access.
One of the most important jobs a growth marketer has is to set prioritization roadmaps. Time converts to money when users are going through the funnel and there are always so many ideas an opportunities to pursue. Typically, my first step is to identify if any areas of the funnel are broken (or non-existent.) If multiple areas of the funnel are broken, I prioritize by balancing user intent with the volume of users.
In this instance, student intent was irrelevant because the attendance of every child mattered. If we did not have access to a student, we had no chance of engaging or retaining her. If students did not have access to online learning, no other problem mattered.
We realized that our first job was to ensure that each child was safe and sheltered and that they had access to a computer with WiFi. It was incredible to sit in on these calls where teachers would volunteer to cross security checkpoints to bring a single student food for the week. While those teachers risked their lives for their most at-risk students, I picked up the easiest task on the list.
68 students without computers—a real problem that can be solved by money. Done. We launched a computer drive on Instagram and raised $23,000 in two weeks from over 70 donors.
We launched a computer drive on Instagram and raised $23,000 in two weeks from over 70 donors.
Here’s how we did it
After COVID hit we knew that many people wanted to offer help but they were paralyzed by the magnitude of the problem and their own instability. We broke the hurdles of donation down into different categories.
TRUST - where was the money going and would it be used efficiently?
NEED - of all the people who need help right now, who needs help the most?
MOMENTUM - is there a multiplier effect to my donation?
PERMISSION - is it safe for me to donate or should I be worried about myself right now?
TRUST - Where was the money going and would it be used efficiently?
When trust is friction, transparency is your greatest tool for conversion. Our campaign had a clear and measurable goal with 263 achievable benchmarks. Every $250 raised got a kid a computer. That computer unlocked the well of services that my mom and the teachers have dedicated their lives to building.
NEED - It is hard to imagine a population more in need than the kids in these schools. The pandemic only multiplied that need. That said, we didn’t just focus on the needs of the students. We focused on the needs of the community and the teachers. They were exhausted and scared and just at the beginning of a long battle for survival. They needed to see that they were supported, and they needed a win. In fact, we all needed to see them get a win.
MOMENTUM - One of my go-to tools in the e-commerce world. We pulled two levers here—social validation (aka FOMO aka Fear of Missing Out), and milestones.
In this moment all of us felt alone, we were scared, and with this campaign we had an opportunity to create something positive. If people saw that they could contribute to a win, they would hop on board.
We broke the larger campaign into small milestones, so people could feel more directly linked to a win. When a person donated we asked them to screenshot their confirmation page and then we shared the confirmation in our Instagram Story with a personal thank you note. When you tag somebody in Stories they have a direct CTA to share and 100% of those people did. This gave us a never-ending stream of content and when people clicked through our Story they could see the momentum grow.
PERMISSION - This is more of a personal question and spans a full spectrum. But underneath the question of permission is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear that you won’t be able to fulfill your own obligations.
The answer to fear is hope, and I personally find hope in community. Providing a community an outlet to have collective impact on the most vulnerable of our population is an overwhelming act of hope.
The other key tool to remove permission as a source of friction was anchoring. As hard as we all had it in that moment, as afraid as we all were, there were teachers and aids who put their own safety on the line for these kids. Their courage and their story gave us all the permission that we needed to support them.
How can the tactics and learnings from this experience be applied across industries?
I know most of the people reading this article are CMOs, entrepreneurs, product leads or managers, not necessary teachers or school admins. At around this point you may be thinking, “Cool story Hansel… but were there any learnings that I can use to grow my business?” The truth is, I learned more navigating this project than many engagements that were directly in my field.
So here we go:
1. Define your process for prioritization
Time converts to money when users are working through a funnel. Identify if any areas of the funnel are broken (or non-existent). If multiple areas of the funnel are broken prioritize by balancing user intent with the volume of users. Look at existing benchmarks (traffic, conversion rate, LTV) to estimate the impact that a 1% improvement on the target KPI would have on revenue. Then factor in time and assign it a coefficient. Are there any initiatives that are time-sensitive (ie. a summer win-back campaign)? In our unique case, time sensitivity was the only coefficient that mattered, but that may not be the case for you.
2. If you don’t have professional content bake UGC into your content strategy
For many of us, photo shoots are not possible right now (or are at least they are limited). Consider how you can craft your campaigns to center around user-generated content. When UGC is submitted take time to highlight the user personally and publicly. Not only is this the right thing to do, but it creates momentum that generates more UGC and engagement.
3. Understand context
Empathy is the basis of effective growth marketing. I’ll say it again. Empathy is the basis of effective growth marketing. Take the time to speak to your users directly. Engage in social listening. Hire growth marketers who see beyond numbers and have an ability to connect with people and public sentiment. Empathy leads to hypothesis, data leads to validation (or invalidation). The best can do both.
4. Use tools and levers backed by studies in cognitive science
I don’t have a masters in neuroscience… but coincidentally my mom does. For better or worse, the best growth marketers have a basic understanding of neuroscience. There’s a lot to study up on here, but here’s a cheat sheet of levers to pull on.
Urgency – Academic studies have shown that “people behave as if pursuing an urgent task has its own appeal, independent of its objective consequence.” (The Mere Urgency Effect; Oxford Academic, Journal of Consumer Research; Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, Christopher K Hsee)
FOMO / Social Validation — Create the illusion of momentum until momentum exists. To get a campaign started target your most loyal users then use their engagement to give permission to the second most loyal batch of users. And so on, and so on.
Loss Aversion — People have a tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. Rather than just offering a discount or a promotion think about how you can give users something that can be taken away. For example, can you offer a promotion with a tight usage deadline (urgency) and then set an automated message that alerts them they are about to lose their free money?
Benchmarks & Micro-rewards — Studies have shown that people will prioritize tasks that offer immediate reward over tasks that lead to a larger more distant reward. Anybody’s who’s procrastinated their term paper in college knows the feeling. Take advantage of this by setting benchmarks that are just out of reach tied to immediate action.
What’s Next?
The campaign exceeded our wildest imaginations and step one of our mission to access was complete. Every kid in the school got a computer. But that was just the starting point.
This is part one of a multi-part series. In the next chapter we will talk about an even greater challenge: engagement. In this case, it required bringing four schools online and actually getting the students to log in for class.
DONATE HERE
We are raising money for teacher grants — The impact these teachers can have on their students with just a little bit of funding has blown my mind.
For example, Reginald Bennett (aka Mr. B), an incredible music teacher in the district, purchased an audio workstation called Soundtrap with a teacher grant.
He then created an ensemble of 30 different special-needs music students from across the district to perform and record their own version of Lean On Me — all during the shutdown.
👇🏽 Subscribe & get the next chapter in your inbox 👇🏽
