My daughter recently participated in the Reach for the Peak program through her school.  It was a really great program co-sponsored by The Upper Valley Healthy Eating Active Living Partnership (UV HEAL), your school, and the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock.  It's message was great, teaching kids to make healthy choices when eating their snack and lunch.

But, I found their marketing program disappointing.  They had all of the tools in place: a website, a blog, Facebook, Twitter an email campaign and print media.  So where was the disconnect?

The Print Media

I received two pieces of print media in my welcome packet,  a registration form and a game board.  The registration form included the website, but did not include the blog or the social media sites.  I would have included these items on there as well.

The Website

The positive: It included links to the social media sites and the blog, gave a brief overview of the program, and include a share me module (a way for visitors to share the site with others).

The negative: It wasn't searchable. When I Googled "Reach for the Peak" their webpage didn't even show up on the first page of results.  This is a findability issue.  When you create a website, it is important that Google can find you by the terms that your target customers are typing in.  The program name and the state it took place in didn't bring it up either.  If I added in one of the two sponsors and searched: Reach for the Peak, UVHEAL or Reach for the Peak, Dartmouth it was at the top of the search results.  The problem I saw: the marketers optimizing the site didn't take into consideration their target customers, parents of young children.  As a parent (and not a marketer) the likelihood that I would have typed in the correct search terms to find their site was small.

Email Campaign

The second disappointment I found was the email campaign.  This program did not have an organized email campaign.  They had one person who was designated the task of sending out emails.  I received a generated welcome email, a generated thank you for completing the program email, and a response if I emailed the contact with questions.  What I would have changed: I would have included links to the webpage, the Facebook page, the Twitter page, and the blog in the welcome email.  This would act as a good reminder for busy parents.  The thank you email included a questionnaire asking how helpful all of these things were during the program.  My response to them was: I love that you had these things, but you didn't tell me that you had them.

Blog, Facebook and Twitter

These tools are great to have, but their Internet marketing promotion failed.  I can't interact with something that I don't know exists.  As a busy parent of a school aged child, I need constant reminders of what is happening in my child's life.  As I said above, these items were on the webpage, but not on any other source.

So, as I think about this campaign, the old saying: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound?"  The answer is of course it did, but more people would have known about it if a news crew had been there to tell everyone about it!