National Recruitment Campaign for Young Talent

Attracting top talent from leading universities to a fellowship program that develops young professionals’ skills while providing support for local nonprofits.

Client
Tulsa Service Year

Year
2023

The Opportunity

Each year, Tulsa Service Year recruits college seniors and recent graduates to spend a year as a paid fellow, working with a nonprofit organization in a discipline of their choice to gain hands-on experience while making an impact in the community.

In recent years, the program’s goal has been attracting a sizable pool of quality applicants from leading universities across the nation to fill a couple dozen fellowship spots. With no on-campus recruitment pushes in place to supplement our digital marketing efforts, we had to nail the channels and creative to get in front of college seniors and push them over the finish line.

The Execution

Get Ahead with a Gap Year

Creative Direction:

After running a stakeholder session to better understand the program and audience, I developed a campaign theme that would guide all of our creative: Get Ahead with a Gap Year. This theme turned the perception of an unplanned or unapplied ‘gap year’ on its head, instead offering a full year of intentional development and hands-on experience that would allow graduates to find their passion and build their skills far beyond what was possible in a typical first year on the job.

It was an attention-grabbing concept to empower college seniors who were brimming with talent and not sure where to apply it. I threaded this theme throughout all ad copy as I collaborated with designers to deliver 24 ad variations.

Channels:

After experimenting with Snapchat and TikTok in recruitment years past, we concentrated our media spend on the channels through which students were most likely primed to fill out an application: Meta, LinkedIn, and Handshake — a job board geared toward college students.

Results:

By nearly all measures, this was the most successful Tulsa Service Year campaign ever.

  • 292k Individuals Reached — including at universities like Cornell, Penn, USC, Notre Dame, Wake Forest, and more.

  • 7,461 Website Visits Generated

  • 262 Applications Received — a 126% increase from the previous year’s campaign.

Key Collaborators

Engagement Lead: Justin Baney

Designers: Amanda Treadwell and Aaron Whisner

Data Analyst: Austin Boardman

Campaign Manager: Alye Vessells