Engaging Young People in Youth Programs

What You’ll Learn

Elizabeth Brown, marketing manager at Panhandle Telephone Cooperative, shares ideas on how community involvement can be a competitive edge, especially when it comes to engaging young people in your youth programs.

Guest Speaker

Elizabeth Brown

Show Notes

Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.

Andy Johns: How can community involvement be your competitive edge? That’s what we’ll be talking about on this episode of StoryConnect: The Podcast. My name is Andy Johns with Pioneer, and I’m joined on this episode by Elizabeth Brown, who is marketing manager of Panhandle Telephone Cooperative in Oklahoma. Elizabeth, thanks so much for joining me.

Elizabeth Brown: Thank you for having me, Andy. I appreciate being here.

Andy Johns: Yeah, we’re glad to have you on. Elizabeth has a lot of great things going on, and we’ve been trying to get together for a podcast for quite a while. So I’m glad that it worked out. You had a session here – by the way, I should say we’re recording this episode again at the NTCA Sales and Marketing Conference, the epicenter of broadband marketing this week. We’re here in Austin, Texas. And so if you hear the voices in the background is not background noise, it’s ambiance. So we’re excited to be here. A lot of energy in the room. Elizabeth, your session, y’all were talking about community involvement. You guys do some really cool things with youth programs and just kind of engaging in the community. But the thing that I wrote down in my notes from your session that I wanted to kind of start off with was you said that being local and being involved in the community can be a competitive edge. And I think that was a really good point.

Elizabeth Brown: Absolutely. You know, as we’re, you know, in the middle of this fiber explosion, right? Everyone’s getting these competitors from the woods, and it’s important to remain local and still be in the community. So by having these projects with FRS, it’s really nice to be able to tell your story and show what you’re doing to really improve your community, to showcase some of the youth and what they can do. So it’s been really nice. A lot of those competitive companies, they come in, and they just want to talk about their price.

Andy Johns: Right.

Elizabeth Brown: And they don’t really invest into the community.

Andy Johns: And FRS if anybody is not aware, is the Foundation for Rural Service. So a great group that does a lot of good work. And the session talked about that quite a bit. One of the things they do is scholarships and some youth programs. So tell us a little about what you guys do for the youth programs in your community.

Elizabeth Brown: Sure. So we actually do the Youth Tour in Washington, DC. And this year we brought it to life. We kind of revived it a little bit. We had been having our counselors at schools submit kids, and we draw from a bucket and figure out that. But this time we decided we want kids who want to be there also be part of that program and have the opportunity to take that trip. And it’s an all expense paid trip, right?

Andy Johns: It’s a good gig. If you can win it, it’s pretty good.

Elizabeth Brown: Yeah. So we had the idea that we were going to ask kids the question, “Why is rural broadband important to you?” And would you please just do a quick little video in less than two minutes and send your clip to us. And oh my gosh, Andy, they were fantastic. I am not kidding. Three of the kids I would have hired right on the spot.

Andy Johns: Wow.

Elizabeth Brown: They were fantastic.

Andy Johns: So, I mean, you know, we’ve had a couple of episodes here at this conference about making video. Obviously you knew your demographic there. Making videos is kind of a big deal for kids in high school. What kind of submissions did you get?

Elizabeth Brown: We had everything. I mean, you had the just the hold and shoot iPhone style, which was cool. But then we actually had one kid on a drone and did footage from his family’s farm. Showed how precision agriculture is really important for their – I mean, my gosh, these kids are 15 to 17, and they already understand it. They get it.

Andy Johns: Precision agriculture was not something I understood at 15 or 16 years old.

Elizabeth Brown: Nor did I. No. But obviously, you know, a family-owned farm. I’m sure he’s also probably working side-by-side with mom and dad. So it was really cool to show that footage. And actually this was really neat. He talked about their family came back to the family farm. They had lived in Denver.

Andy Johns: Okay.

Elizabeth Brown: And they talked about where they had Internet previously from one of the big providers. Their service was poor. It was not as good as when they came back to our territory. And so the dad called and wanted to see what kind of service he could get. And when we told him it was symmetrical gig, he was like, “Well, fine. I guess we’ll pack our stuff and go.”

Andy Johns: Wow. And a perfect example of the kind of stuff we’re talking about all the time. Yeah.

Elizabeth Brown: Yeah.

Andy Johns: That’s awesome to see a real life example. So let’s talk through because our audience is a lot of marketers, a lot of communicators like yourself. Let’s get the nitty gritty about that. So how long did you give them to to get those submissions together? Did you work with school counselors to kind of get the word out? Because that’s a tough demographic to reach with your message. How did you let the kids know? How much time do they have? What are some of the nitty gritty details there?

Elizabeth Brown: Sure. So we use the FRS materials that they give for free, and we pass those out to the schools, of course, so that the counselors should pass that along to their kids. But we also put it on social media. And of course, you’re aware that 15 to 17 year olds do not belong on Facebook. That is your mom or your grandma’s platform.

Andy Johns: It hurt me a little bit to hear that, but yeah.

Elizabeth Brown: I know, right? It’s kind of shameful if you’re still there. It ages you a bit, but that’s all right. So it was actually good, though, because the moms did learn about it, and they encouraged their kids to go ahead and sign up. So we did. We made it simple. Just shoot a quick video, answer the question, two minutes or less. Email it to this. We gave them – I think it was maybe six weeks, which was enough time, but it wasn’t too long where they forget the deadline, right? Because, I mean, we are talking about 15 to 17 year olds.

Andy Johns: I did do a lot of that when I was 15 to 17. Forget deadlines, that kind of stuff.

Elizabeth Brown: For sure.

Andy Johns: That’s familiar.

Elizabeth Brown: Yeah. So, no, it turned out really well, though. We didn’t have a terrible amount of applicants, but I think that the quality was better than the quantity, and that’s what’s important.

Andy Johns: So and then after the contest, you’ve got this great content from these kids. Were you able to use that or showcase that anywhere? Because I imagine that content lived on somewhere.

Elizabeth Brown: Oh yeah, and I wish I could use it in so many more ways. But they did use like copyright infringed music, so we couldn’t share it on YouTube or social media like we would traditionally. But what we did do was we played it at our cooperative annual meeting, and we had about 900 people there. Held them in captive audience in the middle of the CEO’s address to the members. So it was perfect. It was well received. People were applauding. And, you know, the future of the generation is still held in high regard now.

Andy Johns: Well, yeah, and that was the other thing I was going to say is, what better spot? Because if your annual meeting is like any other annual meeting I’ve ever been to, it’s not a lot of 16 and 17 year olds there. It’s a much older demographic. So to see the young kids up there, I mean, that had to be pretty cool for them to see it too.

Elizabeth Brown: It was really neat. It was. And we do definitely have an aging demographic that attend the annual meetings. But yeah, we invited those kids to come, and we do serve such a large territory that they weren’t able to make it. But we do invite them to our campus ahead of the Washington DC tour. So it’s really nice for them to get a feel of what we actually do and the behind the scenes work. So that’ll be fun too. We’re looking forward to that.

Andy Johns: Got it. As you’re, well, we’ll get into that in a minute. Some of the other programs or other community engagements you talked about, there was a lot of other ways that you guys are involved, kind of reaching out to the younger crowd, but then also just kind of kind of touting that community engagement. Because, you know, it’s one thing to do those things, but then it’s always a little tough to talk about how involved you are in the community. What other ways are you guys getting involved and getting engaged in the community, and how do you talk about it?

Elizabeth Brown: Yeah, that’s a good point. And to the point of FRS, we also do the community grants, and we had a really good application with our fire department. But some of our younger demographic events, we did an eSports tournament last year for the first time, and that has been very well received. We work really closely with our local schools and more and more of our area schools are starting to adopt that eSports program, which is fantastic because a lot of them are starting to get scholarships through those.

Andy Johns: Yeah, I think let’s put a pin in that and bring you back for part two, another podcast episode. Because I’d like to do a whole other one just on that tournament. It looked really cool. So next year I assume you’re going to do the video contest again. What are some things that you learned that you know, anything you’ll do differently next year? Maybe that copyrighted music, you know, ask them not to do that. What are some things that you might tweak a little bit as you go on and do it in the future?

Elizabeth Brown: Yeah, that might be challenging too, for a kid to understand copyright law and copyright infringements, but they might understand that they could go and find free music on YouTube that has no holds on it, right? But that is something that we would like to use on a bigger scale. So for us right now, it’s been good to use them at in-person events. But I think the format was great. We had good participation. So I think as we continue to showcase those and as we do like school events and have them on a loop on TVs where people can see them, I think that will be better.

Andy Johns: The last question I have for you, I’ve heard from a lot of people. We heard it in that session. I’ve heard it from other folks that since the pandemic, there’s been just a drop off in participation on a lot of these youth programs, whether it’s scholarships or the DC tours, any of that. What advice do you have for somebody who’s kind of seeing that and is looking at, “Well, do we keep doing this? Do we not? It’s a lot of work. How do we make time to do it?” What advice do you have for somebody who’s on the fence of how to reinvigorate it a little bit?

Elizabeth Brown: Yeah. So for us, it was just kind of slap a fresh new coat of paint on that, right? And it needs to work within you and your brand. So for us, video is a good fit because kids align well with our video content as it is already. But maybe you have a really engaging newsletter, so maybe you want kids to write a short essay or even tweet something. Maybe that would be effective. And you can share it in so many ways. So I think to me, it’s just to get that engagement, to really get those kids to submit something. Don’t hold back. We all took a step back from the pandemic, and we didn’t really fully throw ourselves back in for a bit. So I think I think the traffic will pick up again.

Andy Johns: I think so. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being on.

Elizabeth Brown: Well, thank you, Andy. I appreciate you having me on here. And I cannot wait to hear more of your podcasts.

Andy Johns: Hey, I appreciate that. She is Elizabeth Brown. She is the marketing manager at Panhandle Telephone Cooperative. I’m your host, Andy Johns. And until we talk again, keep telling your story.

Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story. StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.