OUTREACH SPECIALIST
🔆 Central States SER. is a workforce development and education organization that offers numerous programs and resources for individuals to overcome their respective barriers. I had the pleasure to be an outreach specialist for The Welcoming Center Program, a temporary COVID-19 relief grant.
🧠 I designed and executed a 12-week marketing strategy to promote the program’s employment services, job readiness and digital literacy courses, and financial assistance opportunities for immigrant and refugee populations affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Community outreach was conducted via social media, phone, email, local media, and in-person engagement. The most unique aspect about the Welcoming Center Program is that it supported everyone regardless of race, gender, and status!
🛠️ Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, and Lightroom.
📍 Little Village, Chicago, IL
As an Outreach Specialist, I conducted market research to efficiently create weekly cross-platform content catered to our specific English and Spanish-speaking audiences. To provide a sense of security and better fit the theme of the grant, I made sure to incorporate visuals related to COVID-19 control and prevention guidelines in all of our advertising.
FLYERS
We decided to go with a more traditional flyer design to use for Facebook and print. We expected two out of our three main customer personas to come primarily through these two mediums; therefore, we kept the information concise, offered both English and Spanish translations, and emphasized our phone numbers, email, and address as the main ways to contact us if interested in our program.
On the other hand, we took a different approach for our Instagram flyers making them more visually appealing and thus more shareable. We anticipated our third customer persona to come through this platform, so we directed people to an online interest form which proved to be significantly more efficient.
By the end of our 12-week marketing plan, the Outreach team was able to achieve double the conversion rate of what the Welcoming Center grant required by receiving nearly two hundred people interested in our services!
This was possible thanks to our social media marketing, flyer-distribution strategy, newsletter, and local media outreach efforts. We had a segment aired in the Univision 5pm News, were invited to Univision Primera Hora, and were featured in the Block Club Chicago online newspaper.
In the end, the Welcoming Center Program successfully provided service to 79 individuals and distributed $90,000 dollars amongst our participants based on the number of courses completed and the financial assistance they needed.
