This spring and last summer I had the opportunity to intern at LaunchCode and Teach For America, respectively. I worked in the marketing departments of both nonprofits, specifically on the creative side, providing video, photography and design services, and received an inside look at how two drastically different companies are working in almost opposite directions to better American education, employment rates and quality of life. Despite differences in size, history and objectives, the two companies held several similarities in practices for “selling” their service and attracting their desired participants. Notably, similar demographics were targeted by both and certain key ideas and messages were especially present in their marketing materials, perhaps suggesting the bigger problems American education faces. As both companies continue to grow, they continue to pull from other fields with the greater goal of betting American life by providing opportunities in necessary industries. Teach For America’s rapid growth led to questions about quality of service and ultimate impact, and as LaunchCode continues to do the same, looking at methods of marketing, strategies of recruiting new candidates and ultimate big picture objectives suggests possible problems in attempting to patch holes in one industry by taking from another.

History and Background

LaunchCode, founded in 2013, works with companies in St. Louis (and now Miami) to place unemployed or underemployed people in paid apprenticeships in technology, which will hopefully lead to full time jobs. LaunchCode is still relatively small, with 25 full time staff members, and currently has only led to 150 new jobs in technology, perhaps a result of methods and a business model that are hard to grow. Still, with McKelvey, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and a good number of outside funders, it is unlikely LaunchCode will be slowing down anytime soon. At the core, Teach For America is actually quite similar, and was also founded with the objective to place qualified, educated people in an underserved career. The difference, of course, is that Teach For America targets recent college graduates and places them in teaching positions in low income communities. Teach For America places about 6,000 teachers annually now in 46 regions nationally and has grown dramatically both in applications and placements since it’s founding in 1989, especially in the past decade.

At both companies, the major objective is to fill empty jobs with qualified candidates who had not previously considered those jobs, but the greater goals are to lower unemployment, improve education and to a certain extent, improve the quality of life in under-privileged communities. In my short few months at both, a few clear steps away from the initially described goals emerged at both, which made the overlap between the two even more present. First, Teach For America has recently seen a drop in applications from top, private universities, which were once the primary feeder for the company. As a result, especially in marketing approaches, the company targeted professionals already in the workforce, and was especially focused on people with military backgrounds or existing teaching experience. At LaunchCode, in addition to expanding to South Florida, a new program called the Mentor Center was started in Chicago, which created a public space to teach technology skills to at-risk youth and hopefully develop their interest in technology. Although the Mentor Center was not an especially new idea, the fact that it exists suggests a greater expansion of LaunchCode’s objectives beyond simply shrinking the education gap.

Target Audiences

While both LaunchCode and Teach For America are technically nonprofits, marketing is incredibly central to their success and expansion. The directness and targeted approaches of both, as well as the specific images and ideas both attempted to sell, stood out especially. In addition to professionals, Teach For America was especially focused on recruiting men of color, stemming from the idea that young boys are more likely to succeed in school when taught by people “who look like them.” Diversity was a specific focus, as it likely is at most major companies, although I found it often interfered with the ability to truly represent the Teach For America experience. At the marketing team’s stepback in Minneapolis, about half of the sessions focused on millennials, the catch-all age range that despite other efforts still is Teach For America’s key recruitment demographic.

In addition to attracting applicants, Teach For America was especially focused on marketing to potential donors. Teach For America receives prominent amounts of state and federal funding, “$64 million in fiscal year 2009–10, about a third of TFA’s revenue,” for example, but some aspects are still funded solely by gifts and donations. Almost like a university, alumni are a major target, as are parents of corps alumni.

A large project at LaunchCode I worked on also targeted millennials, specifically at Washington University. Because of McKelvey’s ties to the school, we worked to develop a series of posters and postcards for the university’s Career Center, which for me opened up the confusing realization of what exactly the employment gap entails. In addition to unemployment, an attempt is being made to remove what LaunchCode describes as “underemployment,” meaning people with bachelors degrees or similar who are unable to find jobs in their respective fields. While this makes sense, it was somewhat frustrating to see with Washington University as focal point.

While filling IT jobs is certainly important, so are fields in the humanities where LaunchCode would likely have been pulling applicants from. Teach For America has a similar impact, often recruiting English, History or other humanities majors who may have a harder time finding full time jobs after graduating. While the idea is beneficial, it struck me as problematic to be consciously pulling educated people away from their designated fields of study and attempting to reassign them to new careers. Perhaps this suggests the problems both Teach For America and LaunchCode are facing of initial, but then fleeting, interest. Teach For America is often criticized for the fact that people often teach two years before returning to their original fields (earning it the nickname Teach For Awhile), while LaunchCode has seen impressively high numbers at its initial informational meetings but much lower follow through. These two trends suggest a glorification of a hard job, which young applicants especially may not be fully prepared for. While it is obviously someone’s choice to apply to LaunchCode or Teach For America, perhaps people slightly farther out of college who have had the chance to search for work and maybe even experience work should be target instead.

Growth and the Possible Problems With It

At both Teach For America and LaunchCode, the major problem I saw emerging was struggles with growth, although in different ways. Teach For America has recently been criticized for lowering its standards and no longer providing the excellent education its mission statement describes. Specifically, Teach For America now sends about one-third of corps members to private or charter schools that are typically well-funded and not underachieving, and reports suggest less than half of teachers achieve up to standards academic gains with their students. This could perhaps be attributed to the move away from only elite universities, but seems to also just be a result of the fact that larger numbers of corps members make quality control more difficult. Although the acceptance rate is lower than ever, there is hardly a real way to gauge if the quality of accepted applicants is at the same level it once once.

LaunchCode’s expansion is still underway, but it likely faces a similar problem quality being sacrificed as the number of applicants grows. Rather than conducting long interviews with qualified applicants, LaunchCode may need to find different screening methods to see who is qualified. Statistics are not yet available to gauge how the Miami expansion will pan out (the application just opened in March) it seems likely that the demand will be higher than it originally was in St. Louis, either forcing LaunchCode to sacrifice commitment to each accepted participant, or to have to work rapidly to find new apprenticeships. In addition, because LaunchCode is not as familiar with the culture of Miami and the available workplaces, matches may not be as perfect as the initial hundred or so in St. Louis have been.

Ultimately, bridging the unemployment gap is very much a city-specific task, where the skills of the qualified workers and the types of jobs and industries available are drastically different. For example, while it may seem natural to bring elements of LaunchCode to the Silicon Valley, the same problems might not exist because of how integrated technology and related professions are into much of the community and how early students in the Silicon Valley are exposed to technology. While LaunchCode’s growth will likely not stop at Miami (Kansas City seemed to be the likely next stop), intense research and planning is necessary to make sure next steps are successful.

Ultimate Reflections

While there is not the same desperate need for teachers today that there was two decades ago when Teach For America was started, low pay still makes it a somewhat undesirable profession and one with high barriers of entrance. Not all Teach For America teachers stay, but the new emphasis on recruiting professionals rather than just Ivy League graduates is important and can help broaden the qualified candidates and bring people with necessary, real world experience into the classroom. LaunchCode, while not a surefire way to close the unemployment gap, is slowly creating jobs that otherwise were not there and although some campaigns may have focused on the wrong demographic, continuing to recruit largely unemployed, qualified people and providing paid training is surely beneficial. And at both, while growth may create new problems, it ultimately spreads the positive to broader regions and to new Americans who can benefit.

It is surprisingly hard to market positive change, possibly because it is natural to see the negatives and complications before the greater impact. Realistically, the objective of both Teach For America and LaunchCode’s marketing efforts is as much to bring in donations, favorable press and present a positive image of the company as it is to actually bring in applicants or candidates. Both companies are more than meeting applicant goals, but still need to present positive, sometimes glorified, images of their methods to cover up the bumpy road it often takes to reach the desired positive outcome. The big question that needs to be asked about companies like LaunchCode and Teach For America is if the positive impact outweighs the faults (or possible faults that may come). Ultimately, in both cases, I believe it does, even if it is hard to see the light from the inside.