San Diego Unified School District: E-Newsletter Program

Challenge
San Diego Unified School District (SD Unified) is the second largest school district in California, serving more than 121,000 students in preschool through 12th grade in more than 220 schools. SD Unified sought to bring public attention and awareness to the achievements of its students and grow brand awareness among key stakeholders.

Solution
SD Unified worked with MNM to create an e-newsletter program to share positive news directly with stakeholders through an owned-media channel. 

MNM created, launched and managed the successful #BetterSD e-newsletter program, which was introduced at the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year. MNM also supported SD Unified staff and provided valuable feedback on content, messaging and brand alignment, distribution and reporting. The #BetterSD e-newsletter is issued to 100,000 people, including parents, staff members, community leaders and elected officials, on a weekly basis.

Results
The #BetterSD e-newsletter demonstrates value in reaching key stakeholders through specific metrics:
  • Open rate: The #BetterSD e-newsletter weekly channel of communication with parents, staff, community leaders and elected officials in the San Diego community has an outstanding open rate of 31% for the staff list and 22% for the parent/guardian list, compared to the industry average for education-related campaigns of 14.7%.
  • Website visits: The #BetterSD e-newsletter is credited with creating a 48% increase in page visits to the SD Unified's Newscenter. Links from the e-newsletter now drive 80.6% of all traffic to that part of the website with “spikes” on the distribution day (Fridays) according to Google.
  • #BetterSD: This hashtag is utilized by district-owned social media accounts and dozens of other users, so far reaching 75,759 accounts for a total of approximately 122,900 impressions, according to Twitter.