We are pleased to share our Quality Improvement efforts in marketing to students over the two cycles of the Health Equity Student Stipend Program. Our efforts focused on the following four areas: email campaigns, social media, sharing with partners inside and outside of our organization, and website updating. The infographic below summarizes the overall marketing campaign for Fiscal Year 2021-2022:

The results of our email campaigns, led by NEPHTC Communications Coordinator Olivia Stenger, for the Summer 2022 cohort are below:

Our Marketing Intern, Neha Hanumanthiah, spearheaded our social media marketing campaign, which proved to be successful. We reached out to specialized student groups, including UMass Public Health Club, BUSPH Queer Alliance, and Brown University Students of Color, via Instagram Direct Message to ask them to share our post about the Student Stipend opportunity. We messaged 19 groups, 11 of which viewed the message. 10 groups shared the post with their respective audiences. 

A key component of our improvement efforts was to clarify the nature of the program. We made it clear that this was a stipend program, not an internship, and that students would be receiving funding for a project they put together on their own. Our marketing language and imagery reflected this emphasis on money (e.g. “Need funding?” as a subject line on emails, dollar signs on promotional graphics, specific call-outs to students looking for project funding).

We continued these efforts in 2022-2023, with additional improvements and updates to our processes:

• To improve our website, we reimagined the Student Projects Page for the 2022-2023 cohort by designing a PDF page to display the projects, rather than a standard WordPress webpage. This provides a cleaner, more professional, and more standardized look. The PDF is also easier to hand off to partners, project officers, and anyone who needs a quick overview of the program, such as prospective students.
• We found additional student groups to reach out to and messaged a total of 28 organizations via Instagram direct messages asking them to share our post.
• To upgrade our email campaigns, we started a Student Spotlight series to highlight outstanding projects from the 2021-2022 Fiscal Year. We incorporated these shout-outs at the bottom of our emails promoting the 2022-2023 applications. Below is an example:
• In our emails, we included links to Zoom Information Sessions with Maurine Crouch, Program Manager at the Office of Public Health Practice at Yale School of Public Health. These were drop-in, one-hour sessions during which prospective applicants could join and ask any questions about the program or application process.
• We updated and refined our application, particularly in relation to questions regarding sexual orientation and gender identity minority (SOGIM).

NEPHTC Senior Program Manager Karla Todd Barrett, Maurine Crouch, and DrPH candidate Martine Chase shared our quality improvement work with the Massachusetts Health Officers Association (MHOA) and other PHTC student pipeline programs across the country and state pipeline programs in our region to increase impact of marketing to diverse students. 

We would like to thank our Marketing Intern, Neha Hanumanthiah, for her important perspective and guidance with our quality improvement this year in marketing to diverse students. Neha is the Communications Coordinator for Students of Color for Public Health (SCPH) at Boston University School of Public Health. Her point of view was invaluable in our efforts to increase marketing to diverse students, given her lived experience and her work with SCPH. A key takeaway from our improvement efforts is that learning from students with experience related to different populations can benefit our marketing and communications capacity, specifically when targeting diverse audiences. We so appreciate Neha’s insight, and we wish her the very best in the future!