How Get Lit Boosted Their User Base By Over 100%

About Get Lit

Get Lit is a nonprofit whose mission is to promote literacy and to remove educational barriers for underprivileged youth in the Los Angeles area. For over a decade, Get Lit has been using the power of slam poetry to increase literacy, empower youth, and inspire communities.

Get Lit was created in 2006 after founder Diane Luby Lane created a one-woman show about the power of books. She toured colleges, high schools, jails, and detention centers with iconic Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. After the show closed, she couldn’t bear the thought of cutting off the work completely. She started teaching classic and spoken word poetry in three L.A. high schools: Fairfax High, Fremont High, and The Walt Whitman Continuation School. When the semester ended, the students wouldn’t leave. They insisted on meeting after school. 

The rest is history. The Get Lit curriculum has been adapted to Common Core English requirements and has expanded to over 100 schools throughout California. The curriculum has been sold to schools all over the world, reaching over 50,000 students last year. On top of that, Get Lit’s poetic ambassadors, The Get Lit Players, are the most-watched poets on the internet with over 350 million online views. The Get Lit Players are role models to participating students, as 98% of the Players have been college-bound and 70% received academic scholarships.

The goal for Get Lit’s social channels and marketing efforts was to promote overall growth, engage with users, increase participation in programs, and inspire donations and referrals. Realizing that their marketing had become stagnant, Get Lit engaged Kensium’s Digital Marketing Team to enhance their online visibility. 

The Challenges: 

Optimizing and Monetizing Social Media: Our challenge was to raise social media and website traffic across the board and discover new opportunities to monetize their social media channels.

Email Marketing: Get Lit had no process in place for using email marketing effectively. They were not providing touchpoints with their users or nurturing funding leads online.

Ad Spend: Get Lit was receiving money for marketing via Google Ad Grants, a Google service providing nonprofits with money for increasing their online presence. They needed consulting on how to make the most of this grant money. 

We officially began marketing efforts at the end of November 2019, before two massive events required us to shift our messaging:

COVID-19:  Due to the onset of COVID-19, we had to shift the focus to building traffic and engagement for virtual events. Get Lit needed to support these events on the website by adding support for videoconferencing and live streams.
 
The Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM): Given the relevance of BLM to the goals of the nonprofit, Get Lit had a social responsibility to educate their audience on the movement. 

The Solutions:

Optimizing Social Media: We chose 3.5-4k monthly website users as our goal and were able to hit it by optimizing our social media channels to direct back to the website. Each social media channel required a specific approach: 

• Facebook: We optimized the Get Lit Facebook page by adding in missing information, syncing the merchandise store to the Facebook page, and creating fundraisers designed to appeal to Facebook’s broader audience. We utilized Facebook Events to funnel users to Get Lit online programs and virtual events like the Classic Slam. Below is a snapshot of events created in the past three months:
• • Instagram: We optimized Instagram by updating the profile copy, archiving older and more irrelevant posts, and working directly with the Get Lit team to create a posting strategy, grow the audience, increase engagement, and use the platform to funnel traffic to the site. Through efficient communication between the Kensium team and Get Lit’s internal marketing team, we were able to shift the messaging so that it was more on-brand and in-line with the younger and more dynamic Instagram audience.
  • YouTube: We optimized the Get Lit YouTube channel by updating channel art, adding relevant links, and optimizing playlists and videos to include in-links and end cards. We also worked closely with the video content team to strategically roll out new content, as well as leverage old viral content.
  Monetizing Social Media: We decided to build out a Get Lit Patreon page, facilitating donations on the fly. We also monetized the Get Lit YouTube channel by creating member channels in which subscribers paid a small subscription fee for their content. From January - July 2020, there were seven fundraisers for Get Lit created on Facebook, and 15 donations were made because of those fundraisers. Email Marketing: Our digital marketing team collaborated with Get Lit to create a monthly email newsletter called Breathing Fire. We taught them how to structure the content and revamped the design, which added 470 direct referrals to the website from January 2020 – July 2020.Ad Spend: From December 30, 2019 – July 20, 2020, we fine-tuned the ad campaigns by adding new keywords, which resulted in our Cost-Per-Click (CPC) campaigns becoming the 5th top referrer of traffic to the website. Our CTR (click-through rate) also performed well: The previous average CTR was 2% and we raised it to 6.88%.

Currently, we are working on adding more campaigns and funneling traffic to all our social channels using the monthly grant money.

COVID-19:  By adding support for Zoom and live streams on the Get Lit website, the nonprofit was able to hold virtual events with their followers. These efforts have been highly influential: These campaigns increased traffic to the homepage and special event pages. Their two largest annual events, Why I Rise and Classic Slam, were held virtually and brought in the most traffic of 2020.

BLM: We helped Get Lit shift their focus on Facebook and Instagram to educating their audience on the BLM movement and the state of the nation. We collaborated on a lot of content on Facebook and Instagram that directed users to outside sites on these topics, which made Get Lit’s social media a “knowledge hub” that kept users coming back. 

The Numbers: 

Here is a breakdown on exactly how our marketing efforts improved Get Lit’s social media presence: 

Channel 

Baseline (January 2020) 

July 2020 

Website 

1,238 

2,718 

Facebook 

28,534 

28,544 

Instagram 

14,950 

15,571 

YouTube 

69.4k 

70,924 

These efforts were primarily a success, more than doubling the rate of website sessions via social referral:

January- July 2020 Social Acquisition Vs. Previous Period (June-December 2019)  

The Takeaway: 

Overall, Get Lit is thriving. They have achieved most of the original goals established at the beginning of the year. The Get Lit team has amassed a vast library of media content that continues to grow and is now measuring ROI via site traffic, social channel growth, and program participation.

Kensium's Digital Marketing Services

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If you are interested in getting more users to your website and increasing your brand’s Internet presence, contact Kensium today. Our marketing team can provide winning solutions.