Case Studies

Building Brand and Issue Awareness with The National Education Association (NEA)

The National Education Association (NEA) is the largest education union in the country, representing over 3 million public school employees. As a critical voice in the education space, NEA wanted to explore opportunities to engage parents on NEA’s vision and policy priorities for public education across the country.

Client
National Education Association
Issue(s)
  • Education
Services
  • Advertising
  • Brand Awareness
  • Creative and Design
  • Influencers
  • Integrated Advocacy Campaigns
  • Issue awareness
  • Message Research & Development
  • Testing and Optimization
  • Web & Email Optimization
 

Challenge

How can we most effectively reach parents and move the needle on NEA’s priorities?

Opportunity

We leveraged pre-market testing, cross-channel opportunities, tentpole and rapid response moments, and influencers to educate parents about NEA’s work.

Results

parents reached through NEA’s advertising program in one year

impressions generated

increase in support for educator pay and educator support — two central issues of the campaign

Approach

To effectively reach parents and move the needle on NEA’s priorities, M+R developed and executed a campaign that leveraged:

  • Pre-market testing to identify and refine the effectiveness of our messaging and creative for each campaign
  • Cross-channel opportunities to reach parents when they are likely to be most engaged
  • Tentpole moments throughout the year, such as Teacher Appreciation Week, the back to school period, and the lead up to the midterm election season, to reach parents when education is top of mind 
  • Rapid response moments to tie NEA’s priorities to on-the-ground issues and advocacy actions
  • High-performing influencer content from NEA members, centering educators’ voices in our creative mix

Reaching our target audience

Based on results from our message testing and NEA’s priorities for the year, we focused our target audience for the campaign on BIPOC parents in key geographies. We reached our audiences through a multi-channel, always-on targeting approach, leveraging 1st and 3rd party data in addition to direct buys with BIPOC owned and operated sites and content. 

Message Testing

M+R leveraged brand lift studies to measure the impact of NEA’s message among our target audience, testing different tones and issue angles to determine the most effective combination for our target audience. 

Through multiple studies, which evaluated trust in public education in addition to support for specific issues after exposure to the messaging, M+R developed a content and messaging plan.  

In-Market Testing

In addition to pre-testing content to inform the campaign, M+R ran a series of in-market lift measurement tests to evaluate the impact of NEA’s messaging on our target audiences. Our testing used a series of pre- and post-exposure surveys to measure lift. 

From this testing, we were able to further optimize our media mix and inform future campaign and content approaches to reach parents. 

Rapid Response Advocacy

As part of our always-on strategy to engage parents with NEA’s priority issues and campaigns, our team responded to a number of rapid response opportunities, lifting up advocacy actions for parents to take part in, such as an influencer-led advocacy campaign in response to Gov. DeSantis’ efforts to remove the African American History AP course from Florida schools.

Through influencer videos from educators in FL, we drove over 14k parents to speak up against DeSantis, driving a sub $1 CPA across social platforms.  

Influencer video content proved to be one of the most effective creative strategies for driving engagement and actions from parents, and rapid response advocacy opportunities created actionable opportunities for parents to get involved in NEA’s priority campaigns throughout the year.