After more than three years of fundraising and planning, an initiative designed to change negative perceptions about a technical education career path is scheduled to launch in September with a $500,000 media buy that will include statewide television ads and billboards as well as advertising on other types of traditional and social media.
Louisiana Calling, as the campaign will be called, first was conceived in 2013 by a group of local industry leaders concerned about the lack of skilled workers in the state at a time when Louisiana was in the early stages of an industrial construction boom. The effort was originally called the Louisiana Workforce Education Initiative, and its purpose was to encourage more people to consider careers in the technical and skilled trades by removing the stigma associated with not getting a four-year college degree.
For the past year, a team of local and out-of-state consultants has been working on the campaign, which will run for three years. Currently, they are in the preproduction stage of filming TV spots, scouting for graduates of technical education programs who can share their success stories in a reality TV-style format.
So far, more than $5 million has been committed to the effort over the past three years, according to Christel Slaughter of SSA Consultants, which is spearheading the overall initiative as well as the fundraising. Two other firms, C Spence Group in San Francisco and The Purpose Institute in Austin, Texas, are handling the marketing, advertising and branding aspects of the campaign.
The initiative is costly and time consuming. The $5 million raised so far from business and industry around the state is only about half the money Louisiana Calling needs to raise to effectively blanket the state with its message. But Slaughter likens the effort to other paradigm-shifting campaigns of recent decades that have altered perceptions about things like seat belt safety, smoking and drunk driving.
“We’ll know we are successful when we’re changing people’s perception about what success is,” she says.
—Stephanie Riegel
