B6.01 - Approve the Agreement for Technical Services  #20070-ATS-IV for Zelen Communications, Inc. (Communications and Media)

Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS) wants, deserves and needs the BEST teachers in the US.  We don’t just want teachers – we want the top echelon of teachers for our students. Zelen Communications will assist in implementing the Teacher Recruitment Marketing Action Plan.  The plan will result in 1,200 new teachers hired for fall 2020.  In order to reach not only local and regional instructional candidates but also instructional candidates nationwide, Zelen Communications will assist the Communications Department with the planning and purchase of social media ads on the top social media platforms. 

Marketing and advertising efforts to recruit high-quality teacher candidates for the fall 2020 school year includes the following tasks:

Audience assessment on social media platforms, job sites and other online outlets to continue outreach on the most relevant platforms to reach teacher candidates  

Development of required graphics, ads and banner ads for messaging of campaign  

Launch of retargeting campaign and ongoing review, adjustments and reporting  

Continued ad placement and purchasing on social media platforms and reporting  

Weekly meetings to access program results and calibrate as needed 

Analytics and reporting will be shared with Human Resources

In our current world, a large portion of our target market are active on social media, our competitors are there and we need to be there, too. HCPS has the need to plan, structure, purchase and monitor social media advertising in order to reach candidates in targeted areas across the nation. 

Social media advertising is purchased on a daily basis in small increments and requires close management in order to maximize the funding investment. HCPS purchasing processes do not allow for this type of purchasing which is required by social media companies to be purchased via credit card. In addition, the Communications staff does not have the bandwidth to plan, evaluate and manage a social media advertising campaign of this scale. 

Teacher recruitment advertising on social media was one tactic that was used to bring in the candidate prospects needed that resulted in nearly 1,200 new teachers hired for the 2019/2020 school year.

2020 Social Media Advertising and Marketing Campaign as of 5/22/20

Paid Social:  

From April 24th - May 22, 2020 the Paid Social Advertising of ads promoting Teach In Tampa, SPARK and Event Promotion Ads has had 601,410 impressions with 435,577 people reached.  This resulted in 3,842 of post engagement and 2,847 links clicked. The page views of our Teach In Tampa Facebook page have gone up 1,127 percent.

Organic Facebook Groups: 

From May 4 through May 22, 2020, the Facebook Group Event Promotion has reached 92 groups with a possible exposure to 3,094,572 group members in groups specifically targeting teachers, teacher searching for a job and the general public searching for a career. We have had 413 Clicks from this campaign. Virtual Hiring Events via Facebook have an estimated reach of 71.8K thus far with Paid Reach Promotion accounts for a reach of 32,550 and Organic Reach accounts for 30,750 (assumption is that the majority of this number is a result of our Facebook group posting program)

TeachInTampa.com Google Analytics: 

Advertising and Facebook Group activities drive prospects to either registration pages for virtual events or the TeachInTampa.com website.  The first 30 days of the Social Media advertising and social media campaign has resulted in substantial growth of traffic to the TeachInTampa.com website of 217 percent with direct traffic of 45.19 percent and organic traffic of 124.54 percent.

HCPS will be able to reach the necessary incremental potential instructional candidates to result in the 1,200 teachers needed to start the 2020/2021 school year.

2020 Social Media Advertising and Marketing Campaign Forecasted Outcomes

Paid Social:  

Based on this additional budget, we project to run additional Teach In Tampa social media ads reaching 65,000,000 impressions.  In addition, specific ads featuring SPARK and Event Promotions reaching 119,000,000 impressions.  It is estimated that the combination of ads could generate 9,800 link clicks of at least 1,700 viable prospects.

Organic Facebook Groups:

We have joined 101 groups, and continue to increase this number each week. 

Targeted growth here would be organic reach of 54,000 with 900 clicks for event registration.

TeachInTampa.com Google Analytics:

Staying the course with the current campaign we estimated that this traffic to the website could potentially increase by an another 40 – 90% while maintaining a low bounce rate.

(NOTE: We are basing the reach and growth on the data gathered to date. These projections are, to our best knowledge, realistic numbers, but as you are aware because of changing algorithms there is no way of calculating exact figures and results in social media marketing and/or advertising.)

EXPLANATION OF TERMS

IMPRESSIONS: This is the number of times your content was seen on screen. This includes all devices such as desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

REACH: This is the number of people who saw your ads at least once. Reach is different from impressions, which may include multiple views of your ads by the same people. This number is an estimate based on the network's algorithm.

ALL USERS: This is the number of all users who have visited your website page for the time period in the report. This number would include all DIRECT TRAFFIC, ORGANIC TRAFFIC, as well as any other source of traffic.

DIRECT TRAFFIC: This is the number of users who have visited your website by clicking on a link or typing your exact URL into their Internet browser. 

ORGANIC TRAFFIC: This is the number of users who have visited your website by typing a search request or keyword into their browser and have been served your page by their browser. An example of this might include "find a teaching job in Tampa".

* Improve the high school graduation rate

* Improve Student Achievement

* Provide a student-centered learning environment that engages every child

* Recruit, support, and retain a highly effective and diverse workforce

* Continuously improve processes and systems

* Establish a strong foundation of financial stewardship

The Board approve the agreement for technical services  #20070-ATS-IV for Zelen Communications, Inc. to assist social media advertising and marketing for teacher recruitment

Laura Woodard, Manager of Marketing, Office of Communications, laura.woodard@HillsboroughSchools.org, (813) 272-4781
Tanya Arja, Chief of Communications, tarja@sdhc.us, (813) 272-4602

Not to exceed $18,225 from teacher recruitment marketing allocation