Marketing

Kelly Neal:  I have posted comments on Group #1, 2 & 4~ Project manager, setup one of the FB pages, wrote the intro and part of the reflection.

Mike Burks:  I have posted comments on Group #1,2, and 4 ~ Setup FB page, wrote and compiled information for report, created tables and graphics for presentation.I wrote the Marketing Activities and Results and part of the reflection. 

Spencer Matheny: I have posted comments on Group #1, 2, and 4 ~ Setup FB page, sent marketing information to printer, wrote and compiled information for report.

Organizing Adult and Community Education Programs

Marketing Paper

Mike Burks, Spencer Matheny, Kelly Neal

Ball State University

Introduction

            It is important that our group keeps our target audience in mind while creating our marketing, as well as our workshop.  By remembering to “First, make sure your programs, and the faculty who teach them, are truly focused on and interested in adults and their needs” (Sevier, p. 26).  After carefully selecting material for our workshop, we wanted to make sure information about our event was spread out to our target audience.  The marketing campaign of any activity can be a crucial component in the success, or failure of said event.  Our group investigated multiple avenues in which to reach out to the community and inform them of the Big Read. 

            Our first form of Marketing was to create a flyer that was specific to our workshop that will be held at Glad Tidings Church on Tuesday the 20^th of October at 6:30pm.  We wanted to keep the flyer simple, keeping with the flames to tie in to the theme of Bradbury’s book.  Information is placed in an easy to read position, and special quotes from Bradbury are used to be thought provoking, and hook the viewer’s interests.

Another goal for the group was to not only inform members of the community about our workshop at Glad Tidings, we also wanted to be able to reach out to the community and spread the word of the Big Read in general.  Our theory was that even though someone may not be able to attend our event, the may be able to take part in other groups projects.  To do this we created a Facebook page for the Big Read Muncie lead by Group #3.

Marketing Strategies

            As a class, we have to realize we are marketing for an educational program and not an organization. Before we can focus on who we are marketing, it is good to know all of the skill sets that each group member has to contribute for the marketing. Who is a good public speaker, who is good at finding companies, who can create flyers/posters (Burkhart, 1995)? According to Sevier, we need to focus on direct marketing and not brand marketing because we are looking for a response from the community (Sevier, 2002). For our strategy, we went with traditional styles as well as trending styles. We wanted individuals in the community to have something to hold, to see with their eyes, and to have something they can keep. So that’s why we went with the flyer. With that, they have something they can look back on. To add onto the traditional style we used and are still using word of mouth. Every chance our group can get by spreading the word we take advantage of every opportunity with friends and family. We also wanted to use a trending style of marketing for the younger generation of the community. With this we thought Facebook would be the best route. We created a Facebook page so that people could be friends with us and look for information on our workshop as well as The Big Read website.

Budget

            Budgeting is one of the most important aspects in any type of planning whether it would be an event, organization, program etc., and it must be monitored thoroughly. Budgeting is, “a process of planning the future operations of an organization and systematically comparing those plans with actual results,” (Galbraith & Sisco, 1997). For this assignment, we were supposed to reach out to 100 people throughout the community. As a group we made a goal to double that and reach out to 200. We partnered with IFS to have them print off our flyers for us and they charged us ten cents a page, which came out to an even $20. This is our only specific budget item but when we get into the workshop assignment, there will be more we have to monitor. We used Facebook as well, so there was no cost to that.

Marketing activities and results

To get the word out about our Big Read workshop we used several marketing strategies.  We were not sure at first, which strategies would work best. We wanted to find different ways to get the word out and make our workshop desirable for people in the community to come to. The first step we had to take was to establish what the most feasible options for us to use. After a lot of thought we realized we can use Integrity Fulfillment Services to print off flyers for us to pass out and give to our partners and the people of the community, use Facebook to reach out to the younger members of the community, and use word of mouth to our friends and family to tell them about the workshop.  The graph in Picture 1a explains what methods we used in our advertising strategies.

Picture 1a

For the flyers, we tried to use the “Affective” portion of the graph. This means we wanted to change someone’s feeling about our particular product (Lavidge, 2000). We also needed to provide facts and announcements about The Big Read to make the community member aware of the workshop. This adheres to the “Cognitive” aspect of the graph. We believe these were the best strategies to use based on the demographics and our workshop.

Since our workshop will be held on the south side of Muncie, we hoped to reach out to a lot of community members in that area with our flyer distribution. We posted signs up on telephone poles, put flyers on cars, and passed them out to people we saw walking. Passing them out on the sidewalks and at Wal-Mart seemed to be the most effective method of distributing the flyers. We were able to talk to the community members we were giving the flyers to. This allowed us to explain what The Big Read actually is and answer any questions they had about the workshop. One woman asked where the church was and we were able to give her directions.  We passed out 50 flyers altogether. We hope that the people we reached out to are willing to reach out to other people as well. We did not get any definitive answers on who will attend the workshop from this strategy, but we hope some people will attend based on the flyer. We also set up the rest of the flyers in Glad Tidings’ and the YMCA’s lobby areas.

The second method we used to market The Big Read was Social Network Marketing with a focus on Facebook. When someone hears about a gathering or wants to purchase something, they turn to the Internet to do more research on it (Yaakop, 2013). With this knowledge, group 3 created a Facebook page for people to add as a friend on Facebook as well as created a Big Read fan page for people to “Like” on Facebook. We figured this would be the strategy we should use that would get a lot of the people to our workshop. The picture below shows how many friends we have accumulated on our first Big Read Facebook page.

Picture 2a

In picture 2a you can see by the red circle we have friended and reached at least 196 people to date. We are hoping that each of these friends will spread the news about our workshop.  We believe Facebook to be a great asset to our marketing campaign. Our fan page has been doing really well. We just started it on October 4, 2015. When it was created, we invited all of our Facebook friends to join and “Like” us on Facebook. This strategy seemed to really work well with people our own age.  Within the first day we had over 40 likes. We got the community members to sign up for our page by inviting our personal friends on Facebook and posting about the page and The Big Read.

Picture 3a

In picture 3a it shows the rise in interest in the page since we invited people to like the page. If you notice, there is a drop in the likes of the page a day after we created the page.  This is because the first influx of community members was people we invited. To spike the graph again and get more members of the community to join and “Like” our pages, we are doing another day of inviting our friends, commenting, and posting to get the word out about our workshop. The numbers of people being invited are rising every day. We have a total of 196 people and 48 on both pages. This means we have reached 244 on Facebook alone. We hope to reach out to more.

Picture 4a

In picture 4a it shows the number of people we will reach out to after we have done all of our marketing. We can only talk to so many people that we know by word of mouth. We were able to reach around 25 people that were our closest friends and family. The flyers work well too, we will reach 50 people with the flyers. Facebook seemed to be the best option for us. We reached 210 people altogether on Facebook and 285 in all. Our hope is to get the word out to as many people as possible.  

Reflection      

Looking back on our marketing experience, I would say we have learned a lot. From the utilization of our time, to finding the best way to meet our target audience many areas were researched and explored.  We felt our marketing should be spent using online interactions as a way to promote The Big Read, but this cannot be the only interaction with our community.  Passing out flyers is beneficial because of the personal touch it has. It allows people to ask questions if they have any, and also gives the project faces to put to a cause. I believe there is a place for both of these methods of marketing for a campaign that needs to be put on in a short period of time. We will continue to use these strategies for other ventures that we will have in the future.  Advice that we would give would be to start your marketing as soon as you have a workshop plan.  The earlier you start getting the word out, the more likely you are to reach a larger target audience.

Table 1a

1	Purpose	To reach out to organizations around the Muncie area to promote The Big Read
2	Goal	To personally reach out to 200+ people about The Big Read and our Workshop
3	Strategy	Focus on group members’ skill sets and focus on organizational response
4	Activities	Created flyer and used Facebook to create profile page and fan page
5	Results	Have reached out to almost 50 people through flyers and 250+ people through Facebook
6	Budget	.10 x 200 pages = $20 for the flyers

References

Burkhart, J. (1995). Marketing workplace education to business. Denver, CO: CDE, Office of Adult Education, Colorado Dept. of Education.

Galbraith, M., & Sisco, B. (1997). Budgeting and Financing. In Administering successful programs for adults: Promoting excellence in adult, community, and continuing education (Original ed.). Malabar, Fla.: Krieger Pub.

Lavidge, R. J., & Steiner, G. A. (2000). A model for predictive measurements of advertising effectiveness. Advertising & Society Review, 1(1).

Sevier, R. (2002). Marketing Your Continuing Education Program. The Catalyst, pg.26.

Yaakop, A., Anuar, M. M., & Omar, K. (2013). Like it or not: issue of credibility in Facebook advertising. Asian Social Science, 9(3), p154.

Organization

Spencer Matheny - I commented on Group 1, 2, and 4's blog. I was in charge of the organizational structure and management feature. I was also the group leader for this assignment. 

Mike Burks - I commented on Group 1, 2, and 4's blog. I was in charge of the actions portion of the assignment.

Organizing Adult and Community Education Programs
Spencer Matheny and Mike Burks
Ball State University

Introduction

            In this assignment our group is tasked with finding organizations and programs that are able to contribute support to our effort to promote the Big Read 2015 in Muncie, Indiana and assist us with putting on a workshop highlighting this year’s Big Read book, Fahrenheit 451.  The Big Read is “A program of the National Endowment for the Arts, The Big Read broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. Managed by Arts Midwest, this initiative offers grants to support innovative community reading programs designed around a single book” (The Big Read, 2015).  In this paper we will tell you about the programs and organizations that our group will be working with during this project. 

We have partnered with, or are in contact, four different organizations that will be assisting us during this project.  First, we hope to work with the downtown Muncie YMCA to assist us with informing people about our workshop.  We also will be working with Integrity Fulfillment Services who has partnered with us for marketing our workshop.  They will be assisting us with advertising materials needed to inform the public of our workshop.  We have also partnered with Glad Tidings Church in Muncie in which they have agreed to let our group host our workshop at their location on South Burlington Drive on Tuesday, October 20 and may be able to help with marketing our workshop.  Glad Tidings is a community partner with Sutton Elementary School and so they have extended our promotion with them.  We will be able to market our workshop to the teachers and administrative staff of Sutton Elementary.  Each one of these organizations will play a key role in this project from getting the word out to hosting the workshop.  All of these organizations are vitally important to their community by providing these services to the community.

Organizational Structure and Management Feature

            The YMCA has four different operating sites under its management. Three are in Delaware County and one is in Blackford County (YMCA of Muncie, 2015). The specific site we have partnered with is the Downtown Muncie site. Each site has an executive director who oversees all operations day in and day out. Each site also has different activity directors and administrators who oversee certain departments. This can be defined has having a set of functional managers that have expertise and oversee employees in one area of the organization (Hellriegel & Jackson, 2005). Then you have volunteer workers who come in and work during those activities. The YMCA uses a mixture of different mechanisms (Tompkins, 2005), which includes mutual adjustment, standardization of worker skills, and standardization of values. They do not necessarily use direct supervision because with the standardization of skills, each worker is to know how to make decisions within his or her department. Because there are so many divisions and sites, the local YMCA is a huge asset for us to spread the work about the Muncie Big Read as well as our specific workshop.

            Integrity Fulfillment Services is a local business that is ran through assembly line type of work. Its administrative outlook consists of the President/CEO, and Operations Manager, three Department Supervisors, and around 50 laborers. Each department works in collaboration on a lot of projects so there are lots of times where everyone is working with each other. The different mechanisms this company is ran by includes direct supervision, standardization of process, and standardization of outputs (Tompkins, 2005). Looking back at Weber's Theory of Bureaucracy, IFS uses a handful of different aspects from his ideal model of bureaucracy. These include fixed official duties, hierarchy of authority, system of rules, and written documentation (Tompkins, 2005). The supervisors, and sometimes the manager and CEO, directly supervise the work that is being done and inspect the final products. As a whole, the entire organization must collaborate as a team to complete tasks. This can be seen as teamwork competency which includes designing teams, creating a supportive environment, and managing team dynamics (Hellriegel & Jackson, 2005). IFS is a company that has many local clients through other organizations. They are able to spread the word about the Big Read to a large group of people.

            Glad Tidings in Muncie is a local church on the south end of town. The administration consists of a head pastor, associate pastors that are in charge of different departments, different administrative workers, and members of the church. Each pastor has duties and roles around the community where each of them visits different organizations to help minister to weekly. I can see Glad Tidings having different motivational strategies to use as they run their church which include instrumental rewards, specifically considerate leadership, and goal congruence. Churches are all about leadership and each person has to take part and be a leader at some point. Churches usually have the same goal for as long as they are open and according to our text, goal congruence is defined as, "hiring employees whose goals and values are congruent with the organization's and/or socializing employees so that they internalize organizational goals and values," (Tompkins, 2005). They have roughly 800-900 members of the church and that’s not including the people they meet with through other organizations around the community. Not only can they help us market the Big Read but they are allowing us to use their site to host our workshop. Glad Tidings is a community partner with Sutton Elementary School and they have given us a lead to market to them as well.

            Sutton Elementary is located close to Glad Tidings, on 12^th/Memorial Street in Muncie. They are set up like a regular school system: Principle, administrators, teachers, and students. We thought maybe we could give them flyers to post in the school for parents to see and for administrators and teachers to see.
            We like to look at these organizations and look at them in a compare and contrast concept to adult education organizations. All of these organizations have the main roles of planning, organizing, leading, staffing and controlling, but when it comes to adult education, programming an organization might be the biggest role their is for managers (Adult Learning). However, with that being the biggest role you still have to have functions such as financing, staffing, and marketing to go along with the primary function of all organizations with planning, organizing, and evaluating (Kasworm, Rose, & Ross-Gordon). The organizations mentioned above work in similar ways. They know how to meet individual needs. However, that's something that an adult educator has as a challenge. We have talked before in class how adult education is so broad you can't really define it into one concept. When we, as adult educators, are working with the community, it can be difficult trying to meet individual needs because we have to adapt to different organizations and how they work with the community (Deggs & Miller, 2011).

Actions

The first organization we have is the downtown Muncie YMCA. The YMCA reaches out to the community in many ways. We believe this is a perfect choice to have partner with us. One way the YMCA supports community is by organizing day trips for active adults. Here they go to museums, mystery dinners, and many other informational activities. It would be great if we could get approved for them to put our Big Read workshop on that activity list. This would greatly help us get eager and willing people into the workshop.

The YMCA also teaches yoga classes, swim classes, and they even have scuba diving classes. This means there are several hundred people moving in and out of the building every day. As a group, we thought this would be a good idea to ask them to pass out flyers to the people visiting the building and tell the people about the Big Read program. This will be very important to our group because this is one of the biggest organizations that agreed to help us. We believe reaching out to as many people as possible is our best bet in getting people who want to learn to come to our workshop.

The next place we were able to get partnered with is a business called Integrity Fulfillment Services. IFS is a company that isn’t too far away from the downtown YMCA. IFS packages and ships goods for Jarden Home Brands and Ardagh Group. They used to only average about 20 or so workers for a day, but now they are running at 50 workers a day and still expanding. The owner, Brad, believes in enriching the community and helping people locally. He is a prime partner to have because he holds on to these core values that make him a successful businessman. IFS can help with the marketing aspect of our Big Read workshop due to that Brad is also part owner of a print shop. We will be able to have IFS print off our flyers and posters that we create at a reasonable price. They can then put up those flyers and have people talk to their families about coming to learn. We will be able to reach out to at least 50 people at IFS. We are hoping each employee goes out and tells more members of the community about the workshop. If each worker tells one person, then we have reached 100 people. If we can get people to spread the word about the Big Read workshop, we would have reached more fellow community members than we ever thought possible.

The last main organization partnered with us for the Big Read is Glad Tidings Church located on the South side of Muncie. This church is very community-minded and is always willing to help out. Every year they provide free backpacks, shoes, eye checkups, and fun activities for their “Back to School Bash” for Sutton Elementary (Muncie Glad Tidings, 2015). With Glad Tidings, we can put our Big Read workshop in the bulletin that goes out every Sunday. They also have many other ways to reach out to the community, which includes a mailing service that mails information out to the congregation, an email service for those who prefer email, and a digital sign right off State Road 67. These assets will prove to be very vital in our Big Read workshop advertising strategy. Glad Tidings has a congregation of around 800 to 900. We obviously do not expect everyone to come, but with that many people we hope a small percentage will.

Glad Tidings was also generous enough to let us use one of their meeting facilities. We will have two options to choose from. They have a recently renovated building called Conaway Hall. This is a very nice facility with Televisions, tables, and even a kitchen to the side to serve refreshments if we desire to have them. The other building is called the Fellowship Center. This might be our better option because it is easier to see from the road. The Fellowship Center has a kitchen to serve from as well. If we host our workshop in the Fellowship Center, we can post signs on the road advertising the Big Read. The map below shows how we will lay out the room we are in when we do the workshop.

Each desk can hold 7-8 people. We are expecting from 35 to 40 people. There is room for additional tables if needed.

Additionally, Glad Tidings gave us a lead for Sutton Elementary School. We will also go there to drop off flyers for teachers, administration, and whoever else would want one. Here, the possibilities are endless. We are hoping to get the teachers excited to bring their families and hopefully more. The end goal here is to reach out to the students’ families who will be coming into the school. Since they all live very close to Glad Tidings, it will be easy for them to come and learn. They could even walk so they would not even need to spend money on gas to get there.

As you can see, our main goal is to reach as many people as possible with these organizations. Each one has a very specific part in helping make our workshop a success. We also asked organizations and companies from many different parts of Muncie. The YMCA and IFS are downtown while Sutton and Glad Tidings are on the South side of Muncie. We believe reaching different people with different backgrounds is important, because everyone could use to read a little more.

Reflection

            This assignment/portion of the project is a huge step for our class. This is the point to where we get to find out who will be working with us and what we will have to offer for our workshop. Even though a lot of organizations are turning us down, that’s expected. When you are finding an organization, reassure them that any way they can help is a huge benefit. If you are asking something big of them and they can’t offer it, ask them, “Do you mind if we hang flyers up at your organization to help spread the word?” That right there is a huge benefit for all of us and The Big Read. One thing that we find unique and interesting is that the organizations we are working with are completely different. That’s exciting because we get to utilize these organizations is different ways. We completed this assignment according to our role schedule on our group plan. Each of us had an assigned section of the paper and we all collaborated on obtaining different organizations. With this type of project, you want to make sure you have dates set up in your mind/what you want to accomplish. Organizations look for that to see how organized you are in trying to accomplish those goals.

	Names of the Muncie Organizations which can support the Big Read	Organizational Structure and Management features of these organizations	Main ideas of the organization/management theories which reflect the features of Muncie organizations	Action: How can we utilize Muncie Organizations to support the Big Read based on the features of their organization structure/their management features?
1	YMCA	Four sites, Executive Directors, Administrators, Activity Directors, Volunteer workers, etc.	Mutual Adjustment, Standardization of worker skills, Standardization of values	Possibly donating packages to use as incentives for our workshop. Allowing us to put up flyers.
2	Integrity Fulfillment Services	CEO, Operations Manager, Supervisors, Laborers	Direct Supervision, Standardization of process, Standardization of output, Standardization of Values	Printing off our flyers and posters. Helping promote through their organization.
3	Glad Tidings Church	Head Pastor, Associate Pastors, Administrators, Members	Mutual Adjustment, Standardization of worker skills, Standardization of values	Allowing us to use their site for our workshop. Promoting our workshop through their congregation.
4	Sutton Elementary	Principle, Administrators, Teachers, Students	Mutual Adjustment, Standardization of worker skills, Standardization of values	Promoting our workshop through their administrators and teachers

References

Adult Learning, v.4 (4) March/April 1993, 13-14, 30.

Deggs, D., & Miller, M. (2011). Developing Community Expectations: The Critical Role of Adult              Educators. Adult Learning, 25-30. 

Hellriegel, D., & Jackson, S. (2005). Management: A competency-based approach (10th ed.).                    Mason, Ohio: Thomson/South-Western.

Kasworm, C., Rose, A. and J. Ross-Gordon. "Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education." 
             2010. Sage: Los Angeles, CA. 177-186: 493

 Muncie Glad Tidings. (2015). Retrieved September 28, 2015. 

The Big Read. (2015). About the Big Read. Retrieved September 19, 2015, from http://www.neabigread.org/about.php. 

 Tompkins, J. (2005). Organization theory and public management. Australia: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. 

YMCA OF MUNCIE. (2015). Retrieved September 28, 2015, from http://www.muncieymca.org/about-the-ymca/locations/