On November 2, 2010, Madison Area Technical College in Madison, Wis., won public support for a $134-million rebuilding project by almost 60 percent of the vote. With a 22-percent enrollment increase in the previous five years, facilities were overcrowded. Major improvements had not been made in more than 30 years, despite the need for updated classrooms and equipment for 21st-century students, particularly those in health careers, protective services, and advanced manufacturing.
We scored our unlikely victory with a two-month educational-outreach campaign that reached more than one million friends, citizens, and neighbors. So how did a community college reach such a critical mass in less than nine weeks, in an anti-tax climate?
Madison College, as our institution is known, used all the traditional messaging formats: direct mail, radio ads, a small television buy, newspaper endorsements, and 132 face-to-face presentations, including meetings with our faculty, staff, and students, as well as talks at community centers, service clubs, media outlets, and county boards. More important, we also employed an innovative, aggressive, and multitiered social-media campaign.
Assisted by two in-house social-media managers, several student interns, college leaders, and a band of young consultants who spent weeks strategizing how to best reach our audience, the college created an e-mail campaign, a crowdsourcing project, a blog about alumni accomplishments, an “electronic lawn sign” campaign, and a Facebook page that attracted more than 88,000 visitors.
Early on, we faced a couple of significant challenges. For one thing, social media is a chaotic space in which users expect real-time answers to questions, and quickly. But our college’s employees, perhaps our strongest group of natural advocates, couldn’t always do that. They had to walk a fine line during the campaign: State rules require that college employees may only “educate” during work hours, and engage in “advocacy” during free time, breaks, or before and after work. But social media doesn’t really work that way. It’s a 24/7 medium that often blurs the lines between personal and promotional. On any Facebook page, there’s a lot of advocacy going on, whether for a new beer or a funny YouTube video. So we had to make it very clear to college employees and our interns that social media that even hinted of advocacy was forbidden on college time or with the use of college resources.
To avoid those pitfalls and maximize our outreach effort, the college hired a team of consultants to help us with both the education effort, led by the college’s communications team, and the advocacy effort, organized by the college’s nonprofit foundation.
One of the consultants’ first missions was to teach us how to maximize the reach of e-mail—still an extremely powerful social-media tool—by crafting the kind of messages and calls to action that would motivate people to open (and keep opening) them. They suggested we invite e-mail recipients to join our crowdsourcing effort, ask for help on a survey, and offer them opportunities to get involved.
We were surprised by how easy it was to get e-mail addresses from public institutions. There are 40,000 students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and another 40,000 Madison College students districtwide, so we simply acquired those students’ e-mail addresses through an open-records request. Then we e-mailed the students almost every other day.
We also used Twitter to launch a “VoteYesMadCollege” channel. Our tweeters were able to jump into the stream of endorsements and retweets from business, labor, UW-Madison, local bloggers, and influential tweeters who were busily covering other parts of the election, including red-hot gubernatorial and senatorial races. In turn, some of those outside tweeters picked up some of our messages, including ones touting that 89 percent of our graduates are employed in six months, and that the economy receives nearly $4 for every $1 invested in Wisconsin technical colleges.
Our consultants also helped us increase our reach by enticing our e-mail recipients to visit our page on Facebook, a growing powerhouse in social marketing and a linchpin of our strategy. They were clear that it is not enough to simply say, “Join us on our Facebook page,” as many traditional outlets do, so we used several tactics to increase our Facebook traffic, including an introductory drawing for an iPad for people who “liked” our Facebook page.
They taught us to link our customized Facebook page, at www.facebook.com/madisoncollege, and our Web content by offering users one-click links to our blogs and other college sites. We gained fans for programs by creating conversations, including one appeal from a fan of our veterinary-technician program to find a home for a kitten.
Our page “likes” spiked the first week to about 500 people, then stalled. But our analysis showed that our Facebook page had 7,000 “lurkers” by the second weekend who were checking out, but not “liking,” the page. We realized that we needed authentic voices to keep traffic growing and to expand our online conversations on Facebook. The site’s users are wise to automatic-content generation and prefer sites that offer customized material and maintain real-time conversations through posts from real people. We enlisted faculty, staff, and student leaders. We also assigned our interns and hired our student marketing club to help us keep the conversation authentic.
By the second week, we noticed that students began engaging with our social networks, first by asking questions about general college issues. Then a few opponents joined the conversation and a robust discussion erupted. By the end of six weeks, we had about 4,500 friends and 88,000 page views. Fifty-three percent of our traffic for the referendum’s Facebook pages came from users’ general searches for college information.
We reached hundreds of influential locals, including editors and reporters at the newspaper and television stations, who were impressed by our smart digital strategy. Some of them used the tweets as story ideas. In fact, our “earned media,” which measures coverage by news reporters, increased 71 percent over October, November, and December 2010 compared with the previous year.
Despite the buzz we were generating online, a poll near the end of the campaign showed that our chances of winning the election were waning. Our consultants recommended a strategy called “electronic lawn signs": We asked our Facebook friends to swap their profile photos for a thumbnail image that said “Be a Hero MATC Nov. 2" or “Vote Yes MATC referendum.” Every time a Facebook friend replaced a thumbnail, his or her Facebook pals got an update about it. Every time that person posted a message on Facebook, the college-branded profile photo showed up on the general newsfeed. Soon we had thousands of friend-ambassadors organically spreading our message by their activity on the site.
We estimated that more than one million, and perhaps as many as five million, impressions about the campaign were shared, primarily by Facebook users who had more than 500 “friends.” That did not happen by chance: Our consultants had actively recruited them early in the campaign by searching for local Facebook users with large friend bases, and asking them to reach out to those they knew or who had similar interests to pass on our story to their “friends” through postings, responses, or retweets on Twitter.
Finally, late in the campaign, we launched a digital “idea forum” called FutureofMadison.org that awarded scholarships for big community ideas. This crowdsourcing tactic promised entrants that all suggestions for our community’s future would be placed in a time capsule inside the foundation of the first building the referendum dollars would finance. Seven winners were chosen, and while we received more than 350 ideas, we intend to expand this good idea and repeat it by partnering with our local K-12 school students, our future customers.
The buzz about Madison College in the local community is stronger than it ever has been. We intend to leverage that positive momentum and engage real-time communications to bring voters along with us during our multiyear building plan and to harvest the useful ideas that are still flooding into our Web site, www.futureofmadison.org. As we have learned, you can get by with a little help from your Facebook friends.
