Kansas spent a record $7.1 billion, or $14,848 per student, in 2020 on education. Despite this tremendous investment in education, thousands of Kansas students are struggling. The state has very low student achievement productivity, ranking No. 38 among the states.

To highlight the need for reform, the Kansas Policy Institute created a 35-minute documentary that contrasted the K-12 academic performance reforms Florida made over the last 20 years with the flat-lined progress Kansas has made during this same time.

Kansas Policy’s goal was to not just increase the views of the film, but to grow and expand an educated audience that is passionate about effective K-12 education. Through a thoughtful outreach campaign, Kansas Policy used the film to grow their owned audience by nearly 40 percent. 

SPN: What was your project?

Kansas Policy Institute: Our team created a documentary that told the story of how Florida implemented a public education reform that improved student achievement from being one of the worst-performing states to one of the best—and how Kansas has made no progress during the same period. We used this film to identify people in the state who were interested in education and our work to provide solutions for Kansas families.

SPN: To what audience groups were you seeking to expand your brand reach?

Kansas Policy Institute: We wanted to reach both sides of the political spectrum, registered voters, school boards, and teachers. However, our primary audience was concerned parents and caretakers that had school-aged children.

SPN: What mechanisms did you use to expand your audience? (platforms, tools, tactics, etc.)

Kansas Policy Institute: We knew we needed outreach and advertising strategies that were not dependent on social media platforms. With that in mind, the first new strategy we tried was a detailed marketing acquisition campaign. We reached out to Sue Zoldak to arrange for our work to be shown to an audience that CQ Roll Call owned. We designed 10 different banner images and gave the audience two different call-to-actions—both requiring the user to subscribe to our content via email. Our content was consistently shown to these Kansas audiences until we reached the amount of purchased email leads. This proved a valuable strategy and an alternative to social media ads.

We also launched a campaign using SMS texting, asking a targeted audience to engage in a campaign by entering their email. This was also new to KPI and also proved valuable. We sent the “Giving Kids A Fighting Chance” graphic to subscribers and asked users to sign our petition via email.

SPN: What did you learn about expanding your audience this way?

Kansas Policy Institute: The acquisition campaign was expensive. But we walked away with an audience that was ready to engage and stay involved and our team is really excited about that. The biggest thing we learned, apart from learning new ways to not be dependent on social media platforms, was to plan effective retention strategies as we employ these campaigns to build on our owned audience. It isn’t good enough to capture phone numbers, emails, and mailing addresses without a well-thought-out retention strategy that is tailored to each subscriber based on how they interacted with your content. We were amazed at the response we received through these new strategies and are inspired to keep our goal of owned audience building in place for the upcoming year.

For their effective campaign to increase their audience, Kansas Policy Institute is a finalist in State Policy Network’s Communications Excellence Awards, in the Expanding Your Audience Award category.