In 2019, I joined DC Public Schools (DCPS) in its Instructional Talent Acquisition and Retention team as the team’s first Specialist, Communications & Digital Strategy. As the sole communications person, my work was multifaceted. It entailed copywriting, text marketing, email marketing, graphic design, paid digital advertising, social media management, and web maintenance. 

In 2021, I transitioned into the grant-funded role of Manager, RISE supporting the operations, communications, and management of projects funded through DCPS’ RISE TSL Grant of $30M from the Department of Education.

In 2023, I joined the DCPS Communications team authoring external written copy, owning social media management, email marketing, paid digital advertising, web maintenance, and supporting content teams with their marketing and communications. I also support with graphic design, GIF creation, and event photography.

Below you can find examples of the work I created at DCPS.

Video

Website

In 2022, I had the opportunity to lead the redesign of the DCPS recruitment website. The previous website had not been updated since 2013, desperately needing a refresh. With this project, I worked with a web development firm to modernize the JoinDCPS website, update content and optimize it through SEO, integrate Salesforce and Google Analytics, ensured that the website was responsive for mobile and tablet devices, and ensured that there was a Spanish-text option of the website for our Spanish-speaking applicants. You can learn more about the redesign work here.

Social

Teacher Appreciation Week

At the beginning of each May, DCPS celebrates outstanding teachers during Teacher Appreciation Week. The theme for 2024 was timeless. I developed this campaign to share the stories of first-year teachers and veteran teachers from across all eight DC wards. This campaign is one of my proudest. I was able to sit in the classrooms of these educators, see them in action with their students, learn why they decided to teach and continue to do so, and share with our audiences the incredible affect they have on our leaders of tomorrow. I captured photos and authored the content found for each educator.

This week-long campaign garnered 278K impressions, 8.6K engagements, and gained 90 followers across our digital platforms. You can find educators who were highlighted during this campaign below. Please click on their respective tiles to read their full stories.

Women’s History Month

During Women’s History Month, I developed a campaign engaging our social media audience with fun facts, highlights, and trivia content posted on our Instagram story and X account. The intention of this campaign was to educate audience about influential DCPS and DC women in history, highlight women that DCPS schools are named after, showcase women considered the “first” of their industry, and amplify how schools are celebrating Women’s History Month.

This campaign garnered 517K impressions, 15.2K engagements, and gained 165 followers across our digital platforms. You can find some examples of our posts below and explore the Instagram story highlight here.

Black History Month

During Black History Month, I developed a campaign to engage our social media audience using trivia content posted on our Instagram story and X account. Throughout the month, we posted visual assets highlighting prominent DCPS alumni and amplified school-based content with the intention to educate our audience on the rich Black history and culture within the DCPS community,  highlight DCPS initiatives that amplify Black voices and anti-racism, and celebrate Black joy.

This campaign garnered 1.15M impressions, 41.3K engagements, and gained 649 followers across our digital platforms. You can find some examples of our posts below and explore the Instagram story highlight here.

Email

Within my role as Specialist, Digital Strategy & Communications at DCPS, I managed two newsletters throughout the year, one to all DCPS educators and one to all approved teacher candidates. Additionally, I managed all external communications regarding instructional talent recruitment, from application deadlines, hiring fair invitations, to policy (licensure) updates, and signing bonus information. Every piece of messaging that went out from the team was either crafted or proofed by me, as the only dedicated communications specialist.

Since I joined, the open rate of JoinDCPS emails increased by 9.9% (percentage of people who opened your email) averaging 40.1%, click-through rate (number of clicks on a specific link or call to action) increased by 1.1%, with an average of 17.3%, and lastly, click rate increased by 2.1%, averaging 7.0%. For context, the industry average for education is a 24.9% open rate, 17.3% click-through rate, and 4.3% click rate according to Campaign Monitor.

To ensure we optimized content, I analyzed what received the most clicks in emails, what times emails opened most, which subject area educators we needed to target based on recruitment data provided by the data specialist, and consistently collaborated with the team’s recruitment manager and cultivation specialist to ensure we were trending upward to meet overall recruitment and selection goals.

Paid Advertising

Over the course of two hiring cycles, I deployed 86 digital ads across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. With each campaign, I made sure to evaluate the engagement and cost to continuously run the most efficient and cost-effective campaigns. This has led to our posts performing better than the average post for each respective platform.

Design