Community Outreach English: Marketing a Community ESL Program

Community Outreach English: Marketing a Community ESL Program Carrie Drake Department of Linguistics and English Language Master of Arts The focus of this MA TESOL project was to develop promotional products for BYU’s Community Outreach English (CORE) program. The purpose of these products is to create greater community awareness of the program and the resources it provides to learners. It is also hoped that the promotional products will aid in the process of recruiting students for the program from one year to the next. While the essential elements of the marketing mix (product, place, promotion, and price) were reviewed, an emphasis for this project was placed on promotion, which translated into developing materials for this purpose. Promotional materials that were created included a video of student testimonials, a new program name and logo, program flyers, and a Facebook page. The promotional video was viewed and evaluated by a group of past and future CORE instructors. From the teachers’ feedback, the video was shortened, the text script was altered to make it more readable, and some video segments were edited and rearranged. After editing the video, a group of 36 CORE students were shown the video and data was collected with a followup survey. Feedback showed that 100% of the students felt the video provided an accurate description of the student experience in the CORE classes. Demographic information also obtained from the survey indicated that the CORE students generally do have access to the internet outside of class, that the majority have newly arrive in the U.S. within the past three years, and that the majority do not work. Further elaboration on the data is provided in the discussion of the findings.