The Horatio Alger Association

The Horatio Alger Association (HAA) established a need-based scholarship program that provides promising young people with the resources and confidence to overcome the adversities they face and pursue their dreams through higher education.

The problem: Not enough qualified students know about the scholarship.

I, alongside 5 other team members were tasked with creating a 360 marketing campaign that:

1. Identify the appropriate educational foundations and develop a strategic/ creative approach to reaching them.
2. Create a marketing plan (media) targeted at high school administrators and guidance counselors.
3. Create a marketing plan (messaging) directed at students themselves that belief in the American Dream.

The HAA (at its highest and most sought after scholarship) grants $25,000. On the scale of higher education scholarship amounts, that is on the higher scale. However, over 3,100 scholarships offer that amount or more in higher education. Also, for the students that qualify to apply, $25,000 will not be enough to cover tuition and cost of living. From the brief, my team and I saw that the HAA offered so much more than money, but we looked into how our target The audience perceived it.

By analyzing over 200 threads across Reddit, Facebook, and more, we found that the top 3 themes that users talked about were monetary value, scholarship logistics, and application advice. This research was done in conjunction with programming and utilizing 4 AI platforms, particularly focusing on agent modes.

Looking back at our brief and doing a deep dive into the scholarship’s offering, we found the HAA’s unique selling proposition that was barely mentioned: The College Success Program. The HAA Scholarship is specifically designed for high school juniors because its primary goal extends beyond a monetary award. The program focuses on guiding students through the college selection process to identify institutions that align with their financial needs and can offer substantial tuition assistance. While the $25,000 prize is an obvious draw (mentioned in nearly all of the 200 applications we reviewed) we noticed that only 6% of applicants referenced the College Success Program or highlighted the long-term benefits of being an HAA recipient.

Insight: The people that believe in you are the biggest game changer. Money is secondary.

Hook: It’s not just money. It’s about turning possibility into reality.

Our goal is to shift the conversation: The HAA Scholarship isn’t $25,000 with some extra help, it’s the College Success Program, supported by a $25,000 award.

Create a vision book that will be distributed to guidance counselors across Title I schools in targeted DMAs. The book will be passed to students in neutral classes where students fill them out starting their freshman or sophomore year. This allows for student awareness of scholarship before they start their junior year of high school.

The idea is filled with strategy. The vision book is a physical handout students can take with and contains materials that actively get them thinking about their future. Many students that qualify for the HAA scholarship, don’t have regular access to computers or cellphones, so the physical component and marketing is vital to this idea. Giving the vision book to counselors boosts the likelihood of recommending the scholarship to students.

Playing on the imagery of actual money, our posters point out that money is important, but state that students need more to highlight all that HAA has to offer.

To view the full presentation, click the arrows.