UTPB: Meeting People Where They Are
- pjwoolston
- Jan 17
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 21
Situation
As part of the reorganized and relaunched recruitment efforts to focus more on recruiting from and serving the local area surrounding the university, UTPB was looking for effective marketing efforts in remote rural towns that had small populations and few opportunities for traditional marketing outlets or efforts. One such town was Stanton, Texas, a town of 2,500 people almost an hour east of the university. Like many of the cities in towns in the university’s catchment area, there were very few outlets for reaching the general public like billboards or local media in order to promote the university.
Solution
For towns such as this, it is possible to identify primary centers of activity and gathering, but this is going to look different from larger locations and places with more media opportunities. One such place in Stanton was the nursing home, directed by the person who also happened to be the town mayor. In addition to be a focal point for activity, the residents of the nursing home were influential throughout the city through friend and family connections. We realized that if we could make an effective marketing connection to them, they would become advocates for the university.
In working with the center director, we decided to offer a regular Bingo game for residents, complete with UTPB swag as prizes. In addition to possibly the first ever instance of a university recruitment budget being used to purchase a deluxe bingo set, we created UTPB-specific bingo cards. We spent a semester returning with some regularity to the town and the nursing center specifically to visit the residents and run the game. We also included messages both for recruitment (to promote interest in the school) and yield (to encourage applicants admitted for that cycle to choose UTPB).
Success
Because of heightened and highly specific focus on mission, the scale of ROI for efforts such as this is always going to be smaller. We had such positive feedback from the town and the residents that we were able to set up a Zoom meeting between the president of the university and the mayor of Stanton to express specifically our goal of continuing support for the town.
