Digital Marketing for IRA Membership

While managing the Marketing and Membership departments, I integrated digital promotions into all of our marketing campaigns. These included emails, landing pages, microsites, and digital advertising. For the campaigns below, I developed the concept, wrote the copy, worked closely with the freelance designer to develop the artwork, and implemented the email or landing page. 

For each of the campaigns below, please click on the linked title or the image of the artwork to view the landing page or email.

(Please keep in mind that these pages were created from 2008-2011, before responsive design. More recent digital projects I have created are mobile-focused and have responsive design.)

You’re Invited Membership Campaign

This landing page was part of a print/digital membership campaign. We did several campaigns with variations of this creative. This version was targeted to members of state and local reading associations who were not IRA members. We had a 35% conversion (membership enrollment) result from this campaign.

 Another version of this successful landing page was targeted to experienced professionals with no other professional affiliation.

Your Career – Career Cycles microsite

After an extensive market research process, we developed user personas for our key customers. I used these personas to develop the Engage membership community and to create targeted professional development content and membership campaigns for each of our member personas. We also used our personas to develop advertising, social media, direct mail campaigns. Our member personas were also used in the theme for our membership booth at our annual convention. Each persona was represented in the booth in a booth-height photo panel. This membership campaign featured the four main personas, with targeted marketing and features for each.

 Inside IRA Council Membership Campaign

Inside IRA was a six-part email campaign series I created to promote IRA membership to the highly qualified list of members of IRA Councils. IRA had regional councils that many educators belonged to without joining the international organization. This series explained the benefits of also joining IRA.

Reaching Digital Natives Online Membership campaign 

This campaign promoted the new Online-Only membership that I developed when I managed membership. This membership helped us to recruit and retain members during the height of the recession.

School Performance – Administrators’ campaign

This campaign focused on how IRA could help school administrators succeed in a time when school performance and high stakes testing were being highly emphasized due to a combination of the introduction of the Common Core State Standards and financial stress on school budgets because of the Recession.

Adolescent Educator Membership Campaign

This print/digital campaign was focused on educators of adolescents. A print direct mail piece and digital ads targeted prospects to this page.

Online Membership Campaign

This campaign promoted the new online membership developed as a result of the Recession causing schools to cease paying for teacher memberships. This particular campaign focused on members who had lapsed when school budgets were cut. This gave members an opportunity to renew out of pocket with the less expensive online membership option.

Passport Membership Campaign

This membership campaign combined an email and this landing page, which displayed IRA benefits as destinations on a passport.

Experienced Professional Print/Digital Campaign

This landing page was part of a print/digital campaign focused on inviting experienced professionals to join IRA.

New Teachers Membership Campaign

When I studied the results we got from our in-depth user research in order to develop customer personas, the most compelling result we found was that there was a very clear need for resources for new teachers in the field. I addressed that in several different ways, including targeted marketing campaigns offering resources specifically developed for New Teachers. This membership campaign not only invited new teachers to join IRA but introduced them to the first of these resources. The promotional aspects of the campaign included a direct mail piece, this landing page, and digital ads.

Teacher Educators and Students Membership Campaign

This membership campaign offered teacher-educators the opportunity to encourage their education undergrads to join IRA as a student and receive a discount on their own membership.

Superheroes Elementary Teacher Campaign

This landing page was part of a print/digital campaign focused on inviting elementary school teachers to join IRA. It recognized how juggling the many aspects of being an elementary school teacher sometimes feels like it requires a superhero and offered solutions to help our everyday elementary superheroes.

Please Note: Several digital samples on the portfolio site are not responsive or optimized for mobile because they pre-date responsive design and the dominance of mobile viewing that there is today. My more recent projects were optimized for mobile. Also, I linked to summaries and PDFs of some of these projects on my portfolio website because a couple of years ago, IRA—now International Literacy Association—did a complete rebranding and with that a redesign of their website.