Teach For America (TFA) is an education nonprofit that recruits and develops a diverse corps of outstanding leaders who make an initial two-year commitment to teach in high-need schools and become lifelong leaders in the effort to end educational inequity. Today, TFA is a force of 66,000 alumni and corps members working in more than 9,000 schools nationwide in pursuit of profound systemic change. From classrooms to districts to state houses across America, they are reimagining education to realize the day when every child has an equal opportunity to learn, lead, thrive, and co-create a future filled with possibility.
Increasing Marketing Efficiency
Following two successful phases of a Salesforce Marketing Cloud implementation, TFA again engaged Cloud for Good to implement Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio into the organization’s marketing stack. The overall goal of this next phase was to facilitate more efficient marketing efforts to prospective teachers, donors, and constituents as they were introduced and educated on the TFA brand. At the same time, the organization sought to continue nurturing relationships with existing donors, corps members (teachers), and alumni. Through integrating Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio with the organization’s existing Marketing Cloud technology stack, Salesforce CRM, and website, TFA is now empowered with a more comprehensive view of these distinct groups, thus allowing for the delivery of real-time personalized experiences across marketing channels.
Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio features significant built-in intelligence that starts collecting data on potential teachers, and other constituents, based on how they’ve interacted with the TFA website, for example, on what pages, for how long, and matches those users to CRM constituents even if they don’t log in. This constant stream of interaction data allows the organization to then, once the website visitors have been identified, finely tune follow-up campaigns and custom-built journeys triggered to interact with users based on their unique levels of engagement.
To help promote the conversion of these visitors, customized web and email experiences are utilized to move prospects through the recruitment processes. The organization’s initial focus is on introducing prospective corps members to the TFA brand, but there is a planned expansion in place to incorporate enhanced engagement and communications with alumni, donors, and other audiences.
Reimagining Business Processes
“The amazing part of Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio is the Journey Builder connection,” said Willis. This connection allows TFA to gather the website visitor’s email address, information on what the unique individual is most interested in on the website, upcoming events, for example, and then instantly trigger a welcome email sharing relevant information with them.
Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio is also able to retrieve valuable data from TFA’s Nonprofit Cloud instance regarding where the prospective corps member is at in their application process. TFA is able to see if a prospective corps member has initiated their application, if the application has been completed, and whether or not they have been accepted. This influx of data is used to make sure the correct calls to action are sent at the most ideal times. The full nurture series is inherent to Journey Builder, and its triggers take potential corps members through several other calls to action, such as meeting TFA recruiters, event promotions, etc., all in an effort to encourage them toward the end goal: completing their application.
Prior to Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio, these journeys were far less customizable and configurable; each user was treated and catered to the same as every other user, no matter where they came from or what their respective interest in the organization was related to. TFA can now customize their communication based on where users are coming from, the content they interact with, the frequency in which they interact with said content, and then send each user additional marketing materials based on their previous website activity and where they are at in the constituent lifecycle. “It’s used to be one size fits all nurture campaigns. Now, Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio helps us to personalize journeys for everyone, relative to their unique situation and where they are coming from,” said Willis.
Innovating User Engagement
TFA is already starting to see innovation spread throughout the organization and promote new marketing strategies that supplement existing processes and bolster overall marketing efforts. For example, TFA is now able to utilize Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio to send pop-up notifications on website pages containing content relevant to the page a user has navigated to.
The image above, for example, is an “exit-intent” popup used to capture email addresses of those who come to the TFA website from a targeted ad campaign for prospective corps members. When the user attempts to navigate out of the page, this popup appears with the purpose of collecting the user’s information for use in a nurturing journey designed to recruit new TFA teachers. Following that journey, potential teachers will also be included in segments for future ad hoc campaigns based on the types of emails they indicated they are interested in, as well as the content they interact most with. “It’s a much more real-time experience versus the more traditional way of manually configuring automated user journeys,” said Willis.
Looking ahead, TFA plans to incorporate SMS messaging and mobile strategies to supplement journeys through text reminders and continue providing the most comprehensive user experience. “We’re constantly looking for additional ways to utilize Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio, reimagine processes, and apply interactions to those processes,” said Willis. In addition to SMS optimization, TFA plans to further integrate Marketing Cloud Personalization Powered by Interaction Studio with Nonprofit Cloud to continue refinement of communication strategies, utilization of interaction data to increase efficiency and user-friendliness, as well as provide increased personalization and better guide constituents through recruitment and donor funnels.
For more information on Teach For America, including how to support, donate, and/or volunteer, visit teachforamerica.org.
