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Tamika Reece - Educator Support Project Manager

Tamika Reece received her Master’s degree from Relay Graduate School of Education. She joins ReadWorks with extensive classroom teaching and nonprofit experience. In 2014, she joined Teach For America, and was an elementary school teacher for 8 years. She is passionate about fostering a love of reading amongst young readers, as well as supporting teachers in this mission. She has had the privilege of coaching and mentoring teachers, as well as developing targeted Professional Development opportunities for them. Now, as a Project Manager, Tamika is eager have a greater impact through thoughtful and intentional planning in this role.

Org Updates: New Staff Members

Ben Nichols - Senior Back End Engineer

Ben is a computer engineer who went to school in Boston before starting his career in the cloud computing industry. After a crash course in the largest computing systems in the world, he moved on to working with small companies where he specializes in system automation, infrastructure design, process improvement, and all things python. In his free time he enjoys cooking, travel, reading, and stand-up comedy.

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Mandy Casamassima - PBR Executive Search

Mandy has worked in and with the nonprofit sector for over 20 years having spent close to 15 years in public education as a teacher and administrator. She began her career as a corps member with Teach For America in the South Bronx and then joined KIPP NYC where she built the region’s Shared Services Team (responsible for fundraising, operations, human resources, finance, technology, and board development/engagement). She joined the PBR Executive Search in 2017 and currently runs the day to day operations in addition to leading and supporting searches; PBR Executive Search focuses exclusively in the nonprofit sector. Mandy graduated from Boston College and lives in Greenwich, CT with her husband, three boys, two dogs and a handful of chickens. She also serves on the board of Teach For America Connecticut.

Org Updates: New Board Members

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Organizational Updates

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Org Updates

Org-Wide Updates�

Launched first phase of recommendation project in partnership with Tailor-ED

Builds on summer 2022 partnership work with TNTP to analyze trends in teachers’ use of grade-level assignments

New webinar offering: Tips & Tricks on Using Question Sets of ELA Test Prep
Earned Candid’s 2023 Platinum Seal of Transparency
Published a new blog post on what goes into creating a ReadWorks passage
Winner of illustration contest announced
Secured corporate funding through Chase Bank for new Philadelphia strategy
New Our Story page details history of ReadWorks, research, and library
In-person January staff retreat with DEI focus

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Org Updates

Org-Wide Updates (Cont.)�

First phase of multi-year research plan is now underway in Stateville, NC
Target districts for digital marketing campaign identified and campaign underway

Separate grouping of target districts for deeper engagement identified to increase new RW sign-ups, overall usage, fidelity usage, etc.

Consultant to help lead work around districts and partnerships fully engaged and progress made on multiple fronts

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ReadWorks Marketing Plan

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MARKETING STRATEGY UPDATE

Building a foundation of marketing with the goals of increasing new users and fidelity of product use, with a focus on low-income communities.

Thank you for having me

I am coming to you from outside of Philadelphia, and I come to you with lots of years of experience of love for marketing and engagement for nonprofits, because marketing to me is such a combination of science, creativity and business-thinking, and to be able to do this work for a greater social cause, is an honor.

I am excited to share some ideas and projects around the new marketing strategy, developed over the course of my 8 months here so far.

At ReadWorks, we are really building a foundation of marketing

We know that ReadWorks has accomplished great user growth, trust and value with grassroots efforts and word of mouth marketing

Now, we are going to build off of that success

And as you see here on the slide, we are building a foundation of marketing with the priority goals of increasing new users and fidelity of product use, with a focus on low-income communities.

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Audience

Strengths

ReadWorks has already achieved a large

share of voice in the school and educator

audience because of high-quality, free

materials that are trusted. We are focused

on teachers across the United States with a

focus on teachers within the 75% free and

reduced lunch category.

•Nonprofit�•Free

•More than 5000 texts in our content library�•Fiction, nonfiction and diverse texts�•Research-based�•Supplement that works with many curriculums �•Amazing social proof�•Engaging tools and platform�•Teacher-influenced

I did take some time some time in the past few months to look into more about our audience and current users and potential users. I also looked at our competition and our competitive analysis.

�I definitely learned some more details, and yes, the audience is an important place to start when building a foundation of marketing because we need to know who we are communicating with so that we can be as effective as possible.

We know that our platform is geared toward teacher users with the priority being teachers within low-income communities, because the teachers from schools with 75 FRL data points show more retention and repeated visits to ReadWorks.

We also have sub-segments of what we count as “teachers,” when you create a RW account, you have a choice of 18 options to help us identify you. ��They range from reading specialist, to Special Education teacher, instructional coach, librarian, homeschooler, principal, tutor, parent and more…

So we are still in a discovery phase around these buckets if identifiers because we are still researching and learning and pulling data to better understand any trends among audiences. Once we have better info on this, we can set-up better emails and communication channels for each bucket of audience. So, classroom teachers may receive a slightly different message than a tutor in the near future. This is all because we know and probably have all experienced that when we receive an email from an organization or company we are more likely to engage if it feels relative.

Good news is, that we have many directions and groups available to us to communicate with.

The Strengths list is here because in looking at our competition, these strengths are really what “differ en tiate” ReadWorks.

There really is no direct exact apples-to-apples competition to Readworks in the market, there are a lot of online reading programs that say they will teach a child to read, but nothing exactly like us and with these strengths. ��CommonLIt may be the closest organization to what we do and they have their strengths and we have ours, but really some of the things that they are doing better right now are around packaging and marketing.��So, the marketing strategy is based on these strengths and not directly on what other organizations are doing because we all are going to make an impact on reading, but we are all a little bit different and will appeal to different needs of teachers and schools.

All the more reason why it is important to have strategy and more visibility to lift up the incredible value that ReadWorks provides.

Just in case

Data: ½ and ½ teachers vs interventionists - For this school year - special education teacher is at the most percentage, but teachers and special education teachers take the most action in printing, projecting and assigning. Work on cleaning this up to understand our audience even more. �

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By the Numbers

Content

100+ headlines, metadata text adjustments on the website

25+ adjusted, updated emails

3 new videos by Harvard J-Term intern June Lee�
2-3 new blog posts are now being produced per month�
400+ new postcards handed out at conferences

Traffic

300,000 website visitors a day

150,000 teachers a week

800,000+ users in our email/newsletter list�
1900+ new email/newsletter subscribers a day (loss is only 150 subscribers on average)�
91% happiness score based on 326 ratings from 21% of customers

I wanted to share some data. I am always in awe at how much traffic the ReadWorks site gets each day. We have so many people visiting and that is why we want our site and content to be even more inviting, which I will talk about that in more detail later.

The first column is really about content developed in our efforts to use more content marketing to drive traffic and engagement. This is especially important for an online resource and as experts in pedagogical content. This type of marketing content is part of that packaging that I spoke about that is so important to get our audience interested and onto the ReadWorks site.

We have so many people visiting and that is why we want our site and content to be even more inviting

Note: The happiness score is based on our customer service program that was implemented less than a year ago and that percentage is based off of people that interacted with our customer service with a question or help request.

A lot of my future work will be translating all of this into users and impact and revenue, and we are still Building the foundation of knowledge around the data. Our current traffic is important because this is a very robust starting number for scaling up to district and school paid plans. We already have some of the built in audience that can help spread the word rather than building the audience, which we also have to do, but this is a start. It is also important because these are starting numbers for building out even more tools and resources to use ReadWorks with fidelity and that will ultimately impact student achievement!

I know this is a lot of data and I can pause here for questions.

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Develop, fund, and staff a multi-year marketing strategy that integrates the thinking and planning among marketing, engagement, SEO (search-engine optimization), etc., including the specific goal of increasing new user sign-ups

Make a plan for how we can best support low-income communities, both in terms of where to follow data and engage communities�
Engage in a redo/refresh of the website homepage that tells the “RW story” succinctly and persuasively in an engaging manner, updates visitors on RW news�
Improve and tailor SEO, Google AdWords to promote ReadWorks to educators, parents, and donors

Goals

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SEO Initiative

Keyword strategy and additional clean-up

Messaging and Content

Prophet Group, Story-telling, Building out communication for audiences

Digital Campaign

Goal: Reach up to 28,000 teachers in 75% FRL districts, it’s a test to see how many convert to create accounts/users

New Homepage/Website Experience

Three goals: Unified experience, communication, functionality

Metrics and KPIs

Google Analytics 4 - Definitions of Success

Snapshot of Action

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Improved response, engagement and partnership

A wider production, publishing and sharing of our evidence around improved student achievement

Continued positive impact on student reading performance in all socioeconomic groups

Increase usage of ReadWorks tools, resources and content

Reaching a larger network �
Increased impact on student achievement in our priority audience of low-income communities

All of this work will contribute

to our ambitious mission and

organization goals of:

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