Creating a Campaign Plan – Mainstay

What is a campaign plan?

Your campaign plan consists of the messages you would like to send to your students.

Before you launch your chatbot, you should develop a campaign plan for the first month of launch.

Once you’ve launched your chatbot, you can ideally develop a plan for the full quarter, but you may still choose to tackle campaigns on a monthly basis instead.

Tips for creating your campaign plan:

Create a comprehensive plan for each student group (freshman prospects, transfer applicants, etc). Each student group should receive between 1-3 campaigns per week that are spaced out by a few days.
Note upcoming deadlines and events that students should be aware of. Keeping the academic calendar open, for example, will facilitate the process.
Sync your text campaign plan with your communications plan (emails, postcards, etc.) to ensure the texts are supplementing what you currently have in place.
Talk to other departments for ideas (admissions, billing, advising, and many more!), as they may have interesting ideas to contribute.
Add some fun to the mix! Yes, nudges are important, but an interactive survey or a fun trivia campaign once or twice a month will also help keep your students engaged.
Set reminders on your work calendar once your campaign plan is ready so you don’t forget to schedule the campaign by the day you planned it for.

At Mainstay we’ve found that creating a calendar in a spreadsheet and populating it with campaigns works well because it allows you to visualize them. (see Fig. 1) However, you may also choose to draw the campaign plan somewhere in your office or list campaigns by date instead of using a calendar.

Figure 1. Sample Campaign Plan

Please note that:

This campaign plan is designed for one student group, prospects, so we have decided to categorize the campaigns by topics. If you are engaging with multiple groups you can add the group names on the left to categorize that way.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can link the campaigns on the calendar to a google doc that houses the campaign content for each specific campaign.

Additional Assistance

Remember, your campaign plan doesn’t have to be set in stone and you can always sprinkle in more campaigns or move current ones around. If you need help defining your campaign plan, don’t hesitate to contact your Mainstay point of contact.

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