The new PepsiMax Bus Shelter ad…

Thought it was pretty good. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Go9rf9GmYpM

Social good is at the top of everybody's mind but sometimes good ole-fashioned funny content works to get the message passed.  How would your school district respond to something generally creative?  Would you give more leeway to a truly genuine idea?  Districts have an attractive demo that ad agencies love.  If you can come up with opportunity, ad agencies and marketers would be happy to reach your audience in a creative way.  

Look forward to hearing back from some districts on this one.  

If I knew then what I know now about Edunomics

The old saying "if I knew then..." comes to mind now that our company (www.k2mba.com) is helping school districts across the country raise new revenues through advertising programs and strategic partnerships.

I've seen and heard a lot of stories about how some districts are "Thinking Outside The Lunchbox" by creating programs from scratch and using existing personnel to sell them.  It's gritty, it's hard work, and... it's working.

There's lots of areas to explore but the old faithful rings true.  It has to pass the smell test.  It has to be logical.

When I started with the first school district (Orange County Public Schools, Orlando, FL) almost five years ago, we went after the basics (online advertising, athletics.) 

Now, what we know and what we use has grown exponentially in programs and revenues.  We are constantly revising, redesigning, rethinking, and reassessing these programs.  The important rule is:  Don't let your ego get in the way.  In the beginning it's easy to hold on to programs you created that maybe aren't working.  It's so important to have a formula that works and finding the time to constantly monitor your inventory sold vs. prices sold at.  Pricing should be structured but monitored.  If you aren't selling at 80% of your inventory you should consider a cost/benefit analysis to see if a restructure should be in the works.

It's something we like to do.  It's called Edunomics.  Contact us at www.k2mba.com if you would like to learn more.  Get gritty and good luck.

NSPRA put out our story in Orange County Public Schools. Got us a Golden Achievement award. Great synopsis of our programs. "Thinking Outside the Lunch Box" Sales & Marketing Initiative details how creativity and a proactive approach to tackling the “budget cliff” through savvy advertising and marketing strategies brought in over $400 million in revenue and in-kind sponsorships to a district willing to “think outside the lunch box.”  More detail after the jump
http://www.nspra.org/e_network/2013-06_successtory

Streamlining-
One of the things I do when a school district brings us out (as an advisor for www.k2mba.com) for a district audit (which is an asset audit where we identify the areas we think could start generating non-traditional revenue for them) is we look to find out where they can streamline their marcomm (marketing/communications) efforts.

The best way to reach your audience - if you are a school district - is to make sure you are constantly streamlining your communication channels with your audience.  You can have specific communication channels such as reaching your employees, your students, and/or your parents but if you start to inundate them with too many messages or messages that aren't pertinent to them, you'll start to lose them.  Same goes if you start sending the same message in multiple formats and then decide to use separate formats for different messaging later on.

In easy speak:  Make sure you constantly, maybe twice a year, look over how you are reaching your parents, schools, students, and employees.  In the picture below, you'll notice Orange County Public Schools homepage.  Since I work full-time in the public relations department there, I work directly with our Director of Public Relations and our media specialists to find areas where they are reaching audiences with important information and we now tie in advertising opportunities in allowing companies to purchase a web banner on this platform.

 

Even better, run some focus groups to find out how to improve on your system, i.e.,what methods work the best, what kind of messaging they respond to, how many ways do they receive your messages. 

This is vital to your marcomm efforts.  It also helps when you decide to sell advertising into these platforms since, when they are streamlined, you'll be using less of your resources to duplicate unneeded messages and increase your viewership in the platforms you select to focus on when you want to get a message out.  This will help you increase your revenues and cut down on unneccessary work.

"Thinking outside the lunch box."  It's a term I wished I'd coined but my boss (Dylan Thomas, Public Relations Director for Orange County Public Schools) actually gets the credit there. 

When you want to gain reach inside a school district that's exactly what you should do... reach inside the school district.  It's important that the product, service, or brand that you are trying to promote to that audience - be it teachers, students, or parents - somehow relates and, more importantly, adds to something relevant to them. 

If you have a cleaning product, find places that need to be cleaned and clean them.  Wrestling mats, desks, lockers, parking lots.  Obviously go through the proper channels, just don't show up and start taking graffetti down off walls but that's the general point.  Schools are real estate, curbside appeal is just as huge for a school as it is a home and they are great focal points in the community - what better way to say you are part of the community than to showcase your product, service, brand or team by getting involved in sprucing up the front of a school.

If you have serve a great dish - get it in front of them - there's hundreds of events in every school district across America that would love free food.  Free food attracts more people to events which general is very attractive to a program since they want to inform or educate an audience when holding an event.  Plus, most of the time a school district can't pay for food.  If Science teachers come at night for a quarterly meeting to discuss strategy and curriculum direction and approach, grab a partner (like Orange County Public Schools did with Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex) and create a "Science Dinner & Experiment" event.  The attendance for the event will soar and your company will look great to this audience since they relate to you and see your support.  Plus, they get to taste your food.

There are hundreds of examples to use but the important message is this:  Be relevant.  Integrate your program.  If you want to reach the audience at schools, reach out to the audience at schools.  Learn what they are doing and find out where you can help.  Sure dollars always help but you can create stronger bonds if you couple that a program that can help your company tie-in to what they are trying to accomplish.

Selling the naming rights to athletic fields and high school stadiums is not impossible and it has outstanding benefits to the school, the sponsoring company and the surrounding community.  Take a look at the video. 

There's a simple formula that revolves around the traffic at the major intersections (that you can get in most cases from the Department of Transportation) and the number of people attending events in the stadium (check with your bookkeeper for the old numbers. 

If you have any questions on how Orange County Public Schools did it, drop me an email and I can help navigate the process.  brian_siatkowski@yahoo.com

nationally televised high school games NEW television concept

There was an article in Forbes about a guy with a brilliant idea to scale out high schools sports by creating libraries of athlete footage from their high school years and broadcasting high school games on a national level.  Here's the link. 

Unfortunately, this idea is idealistic at best. Even though the intent is good, it seems as though he has not done any of the homework necessary to find out how feasible this is and it wouldn't have hurt if the writer of the piece had asked any of the hard questions.  Here's why I wouldn't put stock into

Most major high school districts have very lucrative local cable contracts - in our district, we just negotiated a three (3) year deal where we receive $18,000 per year for the rights and pay $1,000 per football game that they choose to broadcast. The cable agreement also gives the cable network ownership of the footage so when you do catch lightning in a bottle and send a kid to the pro's, they can get some of their money back by selling the footage to larger groups that own rights to those teams and leagues. 

We've also already done "made for tv" basketball for ESPN2 facilitated by Paragon Marketing out of Illinois and set up a game with Austin Rivers (now playing for Duke) got on the same court with Michael Gilchrest (now playing for Kentucky) and made another 10k off that to help support our athletic programs.  At the time, they were the #1 and #2 ranked players in the country.

Of course, ego can get into play and some people will turn on high school games but unless you are a serious die-hard and/or have a connection to the school, athlete or programs, this isn't an area where you are going to attract enough viewers to justify the outlay of costs.  For example, the ESPN2 game I referenced above (with easily two of the best high school players in the country last year) had less than 300,000 viewers nationwide.

There is also no mention on the fact how they'll pay crews to make these games watchable. We've talked about school video departments and students handling the film shoots but the quality wouldn't work for mass distribution of game footage and the truth is that mass audiences don't watch "sports" - they watch elite athletes play sports. That's why minor leagues can't attract crowds and few D3 colleges get media contracts.

The video equipment most high schools have isn't top-of-the-line equipment and many schools haven't ordered new video equipment with all the budget cuts so the footage would look second-tier anywhere outside of a local school broadcast.  Are you telling me I'd be watching ESPN's 30 for 30 series on my Hi-Def and suddenly not notice a high school girls volleyball game being shot on an iPhone? 

High school sports has it's role and we've seen many other areas turn into money-making machines.  Disney turned the League World Series into a cash cow creating an event worthy of the $3.7 million they paid to give ESPN broadcast rights in 2009 in order to air the summer event. 

I just believe, even in that situation, you are watching the best of the best.  Heck, I love the olympics but I just don't know if I'd sit through a local gymnastics competition watching 14-year olds on a pommel horse.