As the U.S. began to be captivated by April 8th’s upcoming total solar eclipse, the experts within Scholastic’s Education division realized there was an opportunity to assist in teaching about this rare event that would be seen by thousands of classrooms—while also raising awareness for one of our long-standing classroom products: Scholastic Magazines+.
Determined to become the go-to resource for eclipse learning in U.S. classrooms, we set out with two goals in mind: generating engagement among educators by providing lesson plans to make the eclipse both a teachable moment and a celebration; and driving website visitation to Magazines+ publications for sampling to cultivate future sales opportunities with K-6 educators.
It takes long-term planning to make short-term moments educationally relevant in a classroom setting. Knowing that teachers typically design their lesson plans weeks ahead of time, we started preparations early to position our Scholastics Magazines+ product line as the go-to resource for teachers’ educational content about the eclipse.
Scholastic Magazines+ is a subscription print and digital teaching resource with supplemental online content that is normally accessed through a gated paywall site. Rather than the social media marketing approach of sampling by showing limited previews of Magazines+ content, we opted to offer instant free access to a complete series of ready-to-go lesson plans and articles for a wide range of grade levels. This allowed us to broadly showcase our amazing supplemental classroom product—and to do right by teachers in a unique educational opportunity.
To complement these free teaching resources, we produced custom graphics and filmed teaching tip videos on-site at Scholastic headquarters with members of the Magazines+ Editorial team. The total collection of social content included in-program videos, article and issue covers and carousels, printable activities and how-tos, engagement/response graphics, and instructional tip videos to celebrate ‘Eclipse Mania’ as a once-in-a-lifetime teaching opportunity.
The campaign schedule was designed to get teaching resources in front of educators with plenty of time to adjust their lesson plans. Each week, new content including free articles, videos, and teaching ideas were posted to the Scholastic Teachers social media accounts. Additionally, our Community Management team engaged with the educator audience to encourage further sharing and pique interest in the Magazines+ brand.
In the final days leading up to the eclipse, we recirculated our top-performing articles in new posts. We also shared daily to Instagram and Facebook Stories as a way of further building awareness and driving traffic to the Magazines+ educator resources and product pages. When the total solar eclipse occurred on April 8th, we shared celebratory graphics across Scholastic’s entire educator social media presence.
Our eclipse content quickly reached lunar heights with educators across the nation! Posts were filled with comments from teachers expressing gratitude for the free resources, excitedly sharing those resources with fellow educators—and even waxing nostalgic as they fondly recalled receiving Scholastic Magazines as students.
During the campaign period alone, we had 575% more visits to the Magazines+ websites from organic social than in the previous quarter. Without any paid media support or ads, our organic social posts generated over 1.1 million impressions, 38,000 engagements, and 3,300 shares along with over 56,000 visits to the product websites. This campaign accounted for over 60% of Magazines+ organic social traffic for the 2024 fiscal year and over 1/4 of Scholastic Education’s overall social engagement.
