In May 2014, Pearson released our second international league table showing which countries have the best performing schools. Named 'The #LearningCurve Index', our announcement usually attracted the attention of governments, academics, education policy bodies and the media. This time round it did that, but so much more too.
In the dawn of 2014, we were making a dramatic change to our business - moving from an Anglo-American publisher to a global education company. This move wasn't just a structural one; it also meant renewing our vision and understanding of how we wanted to influence and be influenced by the global community.
Instigating and contributing to high-level conversations with leading global education figures has been key to this vision. But equally, we recognised that those conversations needed to take place at all levels; not just between governments and politicians, but between teachers, parents and students. Those who are out there, every day, discovering new ways to teach, learn and be empowered by what education has to offer.
Therefore, for The #LearningCurve Index 2014, we decided to not only share the story with specific media outlets and education establishments, but also create striking graphics, graphs, photos and quotes to spur social sharing. On Twitter, Cards custom images and copy tailored for segmented audiences showcased relevant content and drove traffic to the Index microsite. Targeting on Twitter was based on building out likely influencer lists and 'going after' handles that shared similar demographics.
Shaking things up
For The #LearningCurve Index 2014 campaign, we realised that amplification was going to be crucial if we were to achieve our ambition of reaching more people all around the world. We would do that in three interdependent ways: by creating inspiring content, by getting our own employees excited enough to share it, and by using paid promotion to support the organic reach.
We realised that education data can tend to be… dull. Reams of numbers are fine if you only want it to resonate with academic and policy professionals; but if you're going to reach the teacher staff rooms and playgrounds, you're going to need something altogether more showstopping.
So, as well as turning the raw data into the Index league table (because who doesn't love a 'best of' list?) we also created individual social media infographics for each country appearing in the Index, and shared one of these each day over the campaign. We created artwork and copy for a series of Twitter Cards, and used these to draw attention to key headline findings from the Index. We condensed the accompanying 26 page print report into a HTML scrolling report with shareable links embedded in. And a few weeks into the campaign, we jumped on the zeitgeist of the football World Cup by creating an infographic entitled "If national football teams were education systems, how far would they get in the World Cup?"
Historically, Pearson has had a very traditional approach to campaigns - press releases with embargoes and face-to-face media briefings used to be the order of the day. We knew that in order to achieve change in reach and engagement, we needed to use social media to turn that traditional approach on its head; to do less of the broadcasting, and much more of the engaging. We added more users and brands to our social media platforms, such as Hootsuite and Percolate, so that the content could be shared more easily. We created a new global team structure in Tracx, which allowed us to listen to, and involve ourselves in, real-time conversations. But despite all these new efforts, we still needed a more powerful level of participation.
The answer, we found, was right under our nose. 40,000 employees in 80 countries is a fantastic resource; and we used it, giving all our staff digital assets and importantly, the freedom to be open, to be honest and most of all - to listen. "What do you want to talk about?" was the overriding question we posed to our colleagues, catalysing an army of new conversationalists.
Thousands of staff on social media every day has meant that The #LearningCurve hasn't just been a campaign with a start and an end date, but an ongoing conversation that is happening every day, in many ways. And from those thousands, a few shone and inspired the creation of 16 new community manager roles, whose job it now is to insert Pearson into relevant digital conversations. The #LearningCurve will be the remit of one of these new Community Managers, recognising the success the campaign has had, and will continue to have, in positioning Pearson as a leading voice in global education.
The results
Overall, we reached a broader audience than ever before, with more community involvement and a better medium to listen to those communities. Where before, conversations were happening in a diplomat's house in Ghana, they were now happening in a student's house in Mozambique. Conversations were no longer dispersed, but collected and aggregated in one place.
In numbers, the campaign ran for a total of 10 days, during which 150,000 individual engagements were recorded. The overall cost per engagement was 3p. In the US, the average engagement rate was 6.13% with a CPE of 5p, while engagement in the UK averaged 10.89% with a CPE of 2p. With more than 1.8 million impressions the campaign achieved a peak engagement rate of 21.26%. This return on investment far exceeded any paid advertising @pearsonplc had previously run on social media, with our site receiving a record number of visitors during the campaign.
