Focused Intelligence with Behavior-Based Outreach: Connecting Audiences with Education, Apprenticeships, & Careers

The March 2021 NSCRS High School Benchmarks report covering approximately 860,000 graduates from nearly 3,500 high schools indicates that immediate fall postsecondary enrollment rates dropped 4.5X the pre-pandemic rate of decline (-6.8% vs. -1.5%). Even more concerning was the disparity between students of high poverty/low-Income schools. Immediate postsecondary enrollment for students in high poverty schools dropped over 7X that of pre-pandemic declines (-11.4% vs. -1.6%), while low income schools saw an outstanding drop of 13X that of pre-pandemic declines (-10.7% vs. -0.8%).

To help our partners address these dramatic declines and disparities, MOCAN has partnered with WHYSDOM (www.whysdom.com), a need-based behavior and data science company with a comprehensive history in outreach marketing for organizations ranging from Fortune 500 brands to non-profits to local and state communities. Their tools and technologies help identify, locate and connect with audiences and understand the “whys” of audience behavior in real-time.

WHYSDOM has developed a detailed Focused Intelligence resource specifically for MOCAN’s Education and Career professionals. They designed this unique resource to drive highly engaging and relevant communication and activation strategies for Behavior-Based Outreach campaigns and programs. Using WHYSDOM’s location technologies the team first identifies audience location and behaviors utilizing focus areas of emphasis that included Missouri urban and rural audiences of low income, high poverty, and low educational attainment levels.

For each audience segment, WHYSDOM then developed Definitive Plus Persona Sets. These persona sets include; need-based behavior, drivers, segment sizes, audience overview, engagement strategies, key issues, keywords, cultural and content interests, content affinities, outreach approaches, and activation strategies. The top three personas for each focus area include enhanced demographics details such as age, income, education, race/ethnicity, median household income, audience affinity traits indexing, and location traits Indexing.

Personas help outreach professionals create pictures of their audience members. In addition to an outward image, a WHYSDOM’s persona set includes their motivations and behavior and gives you an inward view of your audience. This helps you understand their mindsets and values that drive decisions, see what audiences do through observed behavior, not just what they say they do, explore what’s important to them, and know why it matters. All of this allows you to adjust and adapt your outreach and communications to constantly changing audience behavior.

We complete this picture with recommendations around the type of content your various audience segments absorb, the kind of outreach campaigns that attract them, and how to get their attention. WHYSDOM’s activation strategies help you; apply your new knowledge to content development, deliver relevant contextual messaging at every touchpoint. They guide you in evaluating media buys and even uncover opportunities for new product or service innovations. Content and persona relevant messaging can then be delivered back to any of the given urban or rural audience segments providing optimal return on outreach campaign investments.