The education industry has changed. Students no longer ask "where should I go to school?" They now ask, "will I get a return on my investment in education?" Today's new learner is careful about where they spend their dollars and use an entirely different framework for selecting a school—if they pick a formal one at all. This has major implications on the education industry from K-12 through corporate training. The education industry must catch up.
In response, we created the New Learning Experience, a new approach to education that fosters better engagement, interaction, and quality learning. We believe that through the delivery of leading-edge technology, services, and data capabilities, we can help institutions make an enormous difference in meeting their learners' needs and driving their success.
In July of 2015, we launched the New Learning Experience through a multi-channel marketing campaign we called "Inspire the World to Learn."
Our objectives were to:
1) Enhance our thought leadership and demonstrate to the market that we're a student-centric company, driven to help learners be successful in this new environment
2) Redefine our product portfolio as our response, and solution, to the changing industry landscape
3) Engage with the student audience and improve our brand sentiment on social media, as students are now playing an increasingly critical role in education
The strategy for the New Learning Experience marketing campaign hinged on an approach that sparked excitement and interest during a three-day kick-off period followed by extended engagement on social media.
Kick-off event: We transformed our typical annual event into a multi-day experience that leveraged thought leadership, learner panels, and learner tracks to position ourselves as the leaders in the new student-centered environment.
Social media campaign: To continue the conversation after the event, we launched #100DaysOfLearning—our social campaign to engage with learners for the first time and to promote positive brand sentiment around our vision of a world inspired to learn.
Implementation
We leveraged thought leaders and strategic keynote speakers at BbWorld, our annual education event, to spark excitement around our new approach. BbWorld engages over 7,000 attendees in person and online in conversation over three days intended to advance education. In order to showcase our unique market perception, we kicked the programming off with a student panel— moderated by our executive leadership—to highlight key issues facing students today. The following day, we hosted a panel of education's leaders, including the U.S. Department of Education's Director of Education Technology, to respond to the student's comments. The result was impressive—a true dialogue between students and leaders regarding how today's education landscape both meets their needs and fails them. Concurrently, we announced our new products, best-in class technology, data and services capabilities through an immersive New Learning Experience environment.
During the event we used our branded social channels and custom designed social images to expand the reach of our dialogue with learners, leaders, and educators. We amplified the announcement and showcased our product portfolio through a series of Vines that pieced together clips of learners using the new user interface of our flagship products.
Following, we launched an online program to engage with students called #100DaysOfLearning. #100DaysOfLearning is a social-first campaign that highlights our vision to inspire the world to learn by inviting students to share what they're learning each day for 100 days through social posts including the hashtag #100DaysOfLearning. We leveraged organic and paid media and a website (100daysoflearning.com) to capture registrations, and showcase audience participation. To motivate learners to continue to participate, each week we held prize giveaways. Participants who entered to win were randomly selected to win giftcards, iPads, and grand prize giveaways of a $5,000 scholarship to help students offset their educational costs.
By engaging with learners of all ages and sharing fun facts about the education industry and what it means to be a learner today, students for the first time had a chance to engage with our brand in a positive, fun, interactive way. We positioned ourselves in a new light with end users, and engaged our buyers in a whole new way.
Our launch of the New Learning Experience was successful in a number of metrics, but the most exciting was the program's impact on our brand.
1) Our positive brand sentiment after the launch of the program improved by 32% compared to the same period a year earlier.
2) The New Learning Experience launch messaging was well received at BbWorld. 87% of thousands of attendees surveyed have a good understanding of Blackboard's commitment to the New Learning Experience. And 88% of attendees surveyed resulted in above neutral ratings of having the knowledge of our products/solutions and how they align to our New Learning Experience strategy.
3) We received press coverage in national publications including Wired, Ovum, Wainhouse, Eduventures.
4) Our launch announcements and social media content garnered excitement and above average results. The launch content on Twitter and Vine was shared hundreds of times on social media, 12x more than our average engagement rates, and far above education industry benchmarks.
5) #BbWorld15 trended on Twitter during the corporate keynote and it received 154% more social buzz than our key competitors and the average amount of buzz generated during their 2015 education conferences.
6) The #100DaysOfLearning program met our target goals of over 1.8M impressions, 4,000 social mentions and 765 registrations for prizes.
