Suzanne Wood Raleigh, NC asks:
“I’m starting an after-school writing academy to help kids in grades 8-12 improve their writing. Services include tutoring and workshops on topics such as writing the college application essay.
” I’m having trouble figuring out how best to market this academy, because most parents rely on word-of-mouth recommendations for tutoring and instruction, and I haven’t generated enough momentum yet for that to be effective. Besides, I can’t afford advertising yet.
“Can your Hounds offer some creative ideas for promoting my classses?”
I would suggest setting up a referral network through education institutes, local BBB or chamber of commerce, libraries, offer workshops giving tips to homeschool parents and student or parent socials. A few ideas that may help. 🙂 Best of luck!
Contact local school PTAs to offer a free presentation on a topic of value. Don’t make it a promotional presentation. That’s what your business card, introduction and the first and last slides of your presentation do for you. PTAs love to present good programs of value to parents and I am sure there’s something you can offer to help parents with kids and writing. Don’t worry about giving away your business.
As a college English instructor for the past 7 years, I considered and researched setting up a similar service a few years ago. I will assume you either have a secondary teaching certificate or a MA in English or you are a published local journalist or professional writer. If you don’t have some credentials, it is unlikely you will have the credibility to make it work. My research also indicated that the best way to market such a service was on the internet with a good web site and blog. You don’t need to meet with students to help them. You will be marketing primarily to the students, not the parents, for high school students. You can also set up a payment system online with PayPal. You will also want to offer some basic self-help outlines for free. Mostly students need help applying what is on the outline to the finished product. If you want to have a more traditional one-on-one tutorial, I suggest working for an established tutorial service first and study their marketing systems. If you have done most of this “homework” then an advertorial press release/article in a local weekly or monthly commuity newspaper is not very expensive and has a good free circulation.
Suzanne,
Joan’s idea about the contest is very good. Check with some of the area churches because they may be willing to include a blurb about it (should be for free; these notices are in my area anyway) in their Sunday bulletin for their parishioners.
Also, look for any club or group for Home Schooling. Then meet with a few Moms to demonstrate how you can help them and the kids, and the word will start to spread. These Moms can also help spread it to parents in the neighborhood who don’t home-school.
Karen Zapp, Copywriter
I am not sure this would work for writing but maybe there is a version that would. A new drivers ed school wanted to start working in my daughters high school. One of the owners of the firm lives in town and his son goes to the school. He gave his kid 100 t-shirts with the company logo and info on them to pass around in the school. The students basically all choose what driving school they are going to select and guess what, they picked the one on the t-shirt. This technique is often used in the teen fashion industry and in the adult fashion industry, i.e. the Oscars and dresses. Find the kids that are the influnence makers and give them stuff and the other kids follow.
One problem is that kids often won’t admit that they are getting help for fear of looking to smart, but there might be a way to use this technique.
bruce
All great comments here on this one. Another idea is that many schools provide a regular send-home each week for parents. Our school district calls it “Friday Folders.” They fill the folders with handouts about various school and education- or community-related events and send them home with the kids from grades K-12.
It would depend on the particular district’s policies, but ours allows that anything community- or education-related, whether for profit or not, is allowable, as long as it promotes learning or other concepts supportable by the schools. Yours would be a great fit.
They don’t charge for this service. You simply need to make 2,000 copies of whatever it is you want them to insert and make sure it gets delivered to the school office by Thursday morning so it can get stuffed into that week’s folders.
You may want to check and see if your district, or the districts you’re targeting, have such a program.
Alternatively, many districts are moving to online parent notifications through software packages designed specifically to enable better communication between parents and schools about grades, tardiness, absences, upcoming events, etc. If this is what your target districts use, ask if there’s any program for you to “sponsor” an area on the user interface with a paid banner ad. They may not have even thought of this possibility, and might welcome the additional revenue to offset always-growing expenses. Just think: if you ARE the first one to be there, you’ll likely be the ONLY one for quite a while!
Good luck.
When my daughter was in school, and I was on the school board and wanted all to know about a function, I would run off flyers for each student, give them to the teachers to give to each student. That way all students took home this information for the parents to see. Worked for me. Sure miss my daughter being in elementary school..:) Had so much fun! Hope this helped.
Joanne Boyer
Great question!
Involve local PTA’s perhaps make a donation to their programs or figure out how to collaborate with them.
Make a recital of some kind a pinnacle of the course so that kids can showcase their work… parents love that.
Provide flyers to local parks and recreation places / bulletin boards where parents are waiting for their kids to finish another program. They are looking for reading material.
Don’t know if this will fit your course content but…Find a unique hip angle for the kids to learn to write about “Write your own cartoon show” – place flyer in Libraries
Offer to do a free saturday intro session where everyone comes away with something they have written on paper that has your promo on it.
See if you can host the class at a mall at a time when parents would like to go shopping and can leave their child with you. THe mall might pay you to offer the program!
Best of luck.
Carolyn
All great suggestions–but I’m surprised no one has suggested doing a free demo *for teachers and guidance counselors* who then could send a steady stream of referrals.
Excellent blog! Do you have any suggestions for aspiring writers?
I’m hoping to start my own site soon but I’m a little lost on everything.
Would you advise starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many choices out there that
I’m totally confused .. Any tips? Bless you!
Definitely start at WordPress.org which is free. You don’t want WordPress.com or WordPress will host it and you have limited control over it. There’s a good article about the difference between the two here:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/self-hosted-wordpress-org-vs-free-wordpress-com-infograph/
Find a decent webmaster, tell him or her to build your sign on WordPress.org and recommend a hosting company. The webmaster can also recommend a WordPress theme and discuss with you which features you might want. This will be far cheaper and a lot more flexible than building a site from scratch. Good luck Kristofer!