Marketing Learning the United Way

<p><em>United Way tackled major barriers to educating its global network and realized that if you can successfully reach communities around the world, you can nurture a community of learners.</em><br /><br />For the United Way, having a long reach is essential. One of the nation&rsquo;s largest nonprofit agencies, with nearly 1,300 local organizations in the U.S. and a worldwide network covering 46 countries and territories, the organization creates opportunities and improves lives by attempting to address the underlying causes of problems that prevent progress in education, income and health.<br /><br />With so many locations around the globe and an established history of external marketing, the organization&rsquo;s brand recognition, ability to recruit volunteers and impact on communities are palpable. But external marketing is not the only measure of success in an organization of its size. Internal marketing, especially in support of training programs, is required to build a well-trained, empowered network. This is where the charitable organization has seen a challenge.<br /><strong><br />Spread Thin </strong><br />Within the United Way, the Center for Community Leadership is tasked with the training and development of more than 9,300 employees and numerous volunteers at the organization&rsquo;s local offices across the country. While the organization as a whole is savvy at educating the public, marketing for necessary internal education programs needed improvement. The training and development department needed fuller courses and conferences and higher visibility. <br /><br />With small budgets and limited resources, the learning team determined a need to bolster its marketing to attain a higher adoption of training without spending more money. Though reaching more people without spending more money may seem an impossible task, efficient practices can help an organization save money and programs.<br /><br />In November 2007, United Way&rsquo;s Center for Community Leadership partnered with Expertus to strengthen and align its marketing tactics and attain a higher adoption of training from learners. <br /><br />&ldquo;Training is key to our group&rsquo;s mission of building capacity,&rdquo; said Heidi Kotzian, director of marketing and national events at United Way Worldwide. &ldquo;The United Way&rsquo;s movement will succeed only if our staff has the tools and knowledge they need to effect change. We can promote greater capacity-building throughout the system by marketing training and convincing staff that the training we are providing is valuable.&rdquo;<br /><br />The United Way began by discussing how to effectively market courses, events and other learning opportunities. In this meeting, they outlined some major challenges, including:</p><ul><li><strong>Consistency: </strong>According to Liz Moderi, manager of marketing and learning at United Way, an inconsistent, cluttered set of messages caused confusion in the greater organization. &ldquo;In the past, each course or event had its own look or image and there was no consistency across products throughout the year,&rdquo; she said. Training needed a consistent look and feel.</li><li><strong>Strategic Outreach: </strong>The learning department needed to improve how it got the word out about its offerings and find appropriate methods to share news, generate buzz and increase participation. <br /></li><li><strong>Tracking: </strong>Historically, United Way did not have a system to track marketing messages or measure success. Organizing marketing outreach, messages, target audience and timing allowed the learning team to have a better grasp on success rates.</li></ul><p><strong>Getting the Word Out</strong><br />The marketing team reviewed the challenges they faced and decided the first step was to get back to basics. United Way took a proactive approach to strategic planning and appropriate staffing and enacted a marketing plan that would heighten awareness and improve the response rates for marketing outreach.<br />Over the past two and a half years, the United Way learning team has developed a new, successful approach to marketing its programs. By taking a fresh look at what was working and what wasn&rsquo;t, United Way was able to make some tactical changes that have made a difference in its rate of success in internal training.<br /><br />To improve organizational consistency, United Way&rsquo;s learning leaders enlisted support from the brand team and designed a new marketing campaign called Live United. The group also created a learning version of the Live United look for all print and electronic marketing. According to Moderi, applying the consistent look and feel of a marketing campaign to internal learning efforts made it more identifiable.<br /><br />To achieve strategic outreach, the United Way learning team audited the level of functionality of its efforts to market training. It became clear that additional resources would be required to keep the marketing program on track. &ldquo;We evaluated where additional help was needed, and lobbied and received support from administrative staff for functional tasks,&rdquo; Moderi said. &ldquo;A staff person was assigned to provide better metrics and tracking of budgets, attendance and revenues.&rdquo;<br /><br /><strong>Keeping Track</strong><br />Because the marketing team had not taken a hard look at success rates in the past, it became clear that regular reviews of activities and metrics were essential. <br /><br />&ldquo;We scheduled weekly meetings to review marketing strategy, discuss implementation and determine where help was needed. This provided the opportunity to proactively respond much further in advance to training issues and shortfalls in attendance,&rdquo; Moderi said. &ldquo;We developed tools to help track and monitor marketing messages, including a calendar devoted to tracking the timing of messages that went out over the daily intranet e-mail. We developed an organization system for our files, so it&rsquo;s easy to find what wording we used when we previously advertised a program, allowing us to reuse language and update, saving time.&rdquo;<br /><br />As the team looked closely at how to streamline operations, time-saving techniques were often revealed. &ldquo;We worked to tap into communication and marketing tools that already exist in the building, including listserv announcements,&rdquo; Moderi said. &ldquo;We promoted cross-marketing of learning courses and events by creating fliers to pass out at each event.&rdquo;<br /><br />They also decided to save learners&rsquo; time by cleaning up and shortening the cumbersome learning catalog. &ldquo;We redesigned our learning catalog to make it much more user friendly and economical, going from 400-plus pages to 34 pages, adding online IDs for easy lookup from print to online and icon language that conveyed a large amount of information in a smaller space,&rdquo; Moderi said. &ldquo;We also updated and improved the search functions on the online learning catalog.&rdquo; <br />This proved beneficial, as the print and online learning catalogs are now United Way&rsquo;s most successful marketing tools for learning and events.<br /><br /><strong>Showing Results</strong><br />By streamlining its efforts to market training internally, the United Way training department saw course attendance grow by 31 percent. Meanwhile, even with more students in each class, overall satisfaction scores went up slightly.<br /><br />Despite increased costs and number of learners, United Way has found a steady cost per learner. &ldquo;Fortunately, with more learners, our cost per learner has remained steady, even with increases in catering costs and additional contract trainers, who are more expensive than staff trainers,&rdquo; Kotzian said.<br />In the process, the Center for Community Leadership also witnessed other improvements, including more newly aligned efforts with other teams, better messaging and increases in efficiency. Overall, the United Way has witnessed an increase in its general learning culture because of its enhanced visibility and clarity of message. &ldquo;We have seen a boost internally from those recognizing the benefits of reaching local United Way staff through learning courses and events,&rdquo; Kotzian said. &ldquo;This has improved overall planning and development.&rdquo; <br /><br />Moderi described how this planning and development had taken shape. &ldquo;Every year we have in-depth learning strategy discussions with our different content owners so that they&rsquo;re creating courses that are within strategy, not separated from an overall learning strategy,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;We try to connect programs and courses to each other.&rdquo; This allows learners to proceed strategically from a course they found valuable to another that builds on that value.<br /><br /><strong>Thinking Long Term</strong><br />Moving forward, the group will continue to measure and validate its efforts in marketing training, demonstrating ROI.<br /><br />&ldquo;We are working to improve ROI tracking,&rdquo; Kotzian said. &ldquo;In 2009, we implemented a pre-survey, immediate post-survey and three-month post-survey at a national event.&rdquo; The United Way plans on applying this to other events and courses.<br /><br />Overall, the United Way project illustrates the benefits of commitment to strategic planning and efficiency in learning organizations. Learning leaders are often hungry to clean up inefficiencies and illustrate success, but sometimes need assistance in doing so.<br /><br /><strong>Living United</strong><br />The theme Live United now drives the entire United Way, sending a message to the outside world and the organization internally about coming together for a cause. Internal teams united to bring clear, unified messages to their learners and found great success. <br /><br />United Way&rsquo;s Center for Community Leadership tackled major barriers to educating its vast network and learned a valuable lesson along the way: If you can successfully teach communities around the world, you can nurture a community of learners just as effectively. <br /><br />According to Moderi, nurturing such a community is a continual goal rather than an endpoint. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s something that we consistently strive for,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Whether we&rsquo;ve fully achieved it or not is debatable, but there&rsquo;s increased awareness that that&rsquo;s something we need to continue to work on.&rdquo;</p>