We distributed thousands of college guides across California. Here’s what we learned.
Resources for higher education can be scarce, and many people — including first-generation students, adults, and recent immigrants — are trying to make decisions without quality information or knowledgeable personal guidance from parents, counselors, or mentors.
The KPCC/LAist education team worked to fill that information need by distributing thousands of college guides in multiple languages across the state.
Our goal: to reach people who might not otherwise come across these materials.
The work to distribute “The Adult’s Guide For Getting To College In California” took our paper distribution efforts to a new level. We’ve previously documented why we built a college pathways beat and why we made the guide. Now, we want to share with you the lessons we learned as we got it into the hands of thousands across California.
Libraries can be instrumental as distribution partners
We identified L.A.-based organizations that provide services to adults where the booklets would be visible. We asked them how many booklets we should order and what languages, other than English, their constituents could most use.
We contacted places like the DMV, the YMCA, and Planned Parenthood. We emailed bus hubs across Los Angeles and neighborhood recreation centers. We reached out to public colleges and trade schools.
L.A. County and L.A. City public library systems responded. The systems serve 3.5 million and 4 million residents, respectively. Representatives from their youth services departments worked with librarians to decide how many copies — and which languages — to make available across branches. Nearly 12,000 booklets, in five languages, were distributed to branches. An additional 6,000 were distributed by the Alhambra Unified School District, which serves nearly 16,000 students.
We don’t know what we don’t know
We wanted to make copies available to organizations that weren’t on our radar. We created an order form (made via Typeform) that allowed folks to request copies in multiples of 25, and up to 100 copies, in every language available.
(While no longer active, you can view the Typeform here.)
Here are the kinds of of organizations that ordered college guides:
- Elementary schools
- High schools
- Public and private colleges
- Trade schools
- Adult education providers
- Educational nonprofits
- Libraries (outside of L.A. County)
- Youth services
- Housing services
- Individuals (i.e. tutors)
Leverage existing platforms for promotion and transparency
Through digital and on-air promotions, we received nearly 100 orders that amounted to almost 8,000 copies.
We first promoted the order form via an article on LAist and Medium that explained the project, our preliminary research, and how to order booklets. We encouraged folks to forward the form to anyone they thought would be interested.
Within five days, nearly 6,000 booklets had been spoken for.
Additionally, Brianna Lee, who’d authored the guides, produced a 30-second audio promotion that ran on KPCC. With just over 24 hours of running the spot, 2,000 additional booklets were requested.
Promoting the physical guides online and on-air helped us get booklets into the hands of people who work directly with community members: at adult education centers, schools, housing service centers, and beyond.
Translation demands distribution, and non-English-language distribution plans require relationships
The guides were produced in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, simplified Chinese, and Korean. Through our distribution partners, we sent out nearly 7,000 copies in Spanish, 3,000 copies in simplified Chinese, 2,100 copies in Korean, and 2,000 copies in Vietnamese.
But when all was said and done, we had — and still have — copies available in simplified Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. This further demonstrated to us the need for a dedicated person to engage across community, ethnic, and in-language media partners and ensure copies are getting to those who need materials in language. We recently announced that we are hiring for a partnership producer.
The Post Office makes wide distribution possible, but it doesn’t replace human connection
For all requests ordered via the public order form, and for all 75 branches of the L.A. Public Library, booklets were shipped across California via the United States Postal Service. We shipped more than 10,000 booklets from the KPCC/LAist headquarters in Pasadena.
We saw an opportunity to create another print product — in addition to the college guide booklets — that could lead community members to the digital college guide. We had had earlier success with direct mail, including postcards promoting an event related to Black infant mortality.
We created a small postcard that posed the question “Considering higher education in California?” The face of the postcard also included a campaign QR code and vanity link (laist.com/collegeguide) alongside references to the sections featured in the digital guide. The back of the postcard provided the same information in Spanish.
We worked with our print provider to build a mailing list that targeted areas with the lowest rates of higher education and highest rates of unemployment in Los Angeles. Some 22,000 postcards were shipped across the county. Only 250 sessions with the digital guide were generated from the postcard’s QR code and vanity link. That’s a roughly 1 percent conversion rate.
While we had leveraged a mix of direct mail distribution and in-person distribution for the Black infant mortality work, in this instance, we did not have community members acting as ambassadors to drive engagement in the same way.
Documentation and debriefs matter — internally and externally
In debriefing the distribution process, we asked ourselves: What did we do right? What can we do better next time? Should there even be a next time? That helped us produce a comprehensive cheat sheet for future print distribution from KPCC. (Yes, we’re still planning on a next time.)
While our own reflection was important for evaluating the front-end of the process, we felt feedback from distribution partners was important for assessing how to improve future projects.
We sent an email to the folks who collaborated with us, and shared a form with them that asked:
- Who does your organization serve?
- How did you distribute the college guides?
- Who did you notice reading them the most?
- How many guides do you have left to distribute?
The engagement team at KPCC has relationships with a database of organizations across Southern California we have previously collaborated with, and we spent weeks brainstorming the folks we should reach out to, and the most impactful places to distribute the booklets. But making the college guides available to anyone in the public was critical for this project. It made the guides subject to distribution tactics we had not employed or had only tried at a much smaller scale.
Like, making them available in community Facebook Groups, such as the Buy Nothing Project:
One individual wrote, “I offered in our local Facebook gifting groups (buy nothing, etc). Local residents picked up, as did someone who does family outreach at Saddleback church in Lake Forest.”
Or gift bags for high school graduates:
“They were put in all the gift bags given to graduates at the graduation ceremony,” wrote a staff member at the Coutin School in Canoga Park.
We knew our target audience would be adults, and anyone really, trying to get to higher education. And community leaders — ones who were willing to offer their time and effort — were just the experts we needed to reach that audience.
Because of some internal timelines, we weren’t able to begin distribution of college guides until June. Passing out college materials at the start of summer was…not ideal. Many collaborators let us know that they’re waiting for the beginning of the school year to distribute their copies, too.
Fortunately, these college materials don’t have an expiration date. And we know that print copies will be great additions to most in-person event opportunities.
Documenting this process makes ambitious distribution of other comprehensive print resources feel doable. Right now, KPCC/LAist is reporting on topics like the housing crisis, dyslexia, and the upcoming midterm election. After this lesson in print distribution, it’s time to think about how we can apply what we’ve learned to more areas of the newsroom.
Ways to further this work
- Republish our digital college guide for free.
- Request print guides in our remaining languages (simplified Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese)by emailing me at apera@scpr.org.
- Does your organization want to financially support work like this? Email grants@scpr.org.
- Empower more community-focused reporting by becoming an LAist member today at LAist.com/join.
