Recruitment Strategies for your Risky Business Workshop

Risky Business is intended for high school students. The videos and activities have application across a broad variety of courses. Possible fields of application include economics, business, social studies, health and physical education, and driver education. Therefore you’ll recruit better if you try for multiple channels to reach your target audience. Try not to rely on any one channel, whether it is an association meeting, a flier or something else, to get your message out.

You can have some success through mass mailings or mass e-mailings of the workshop flier. However, these mailings tend to be more successful if they are combined with more personal contact of some kind: personal letters, phone calls or visits with key people. Here are some of the people you would want to cultivate for this workshop:

·  Curriculum directors in your local school districts. Try to meet with these individuals two to three months before your planned workshop time. They will often have information that will help you find relatively conflict-free times for the workshop, and they may even invite you to present to groups of teachers that they organize for in-service instruction. They will also appreciate being informed of your teacher training efforts. You do not want them to find out about your workshop first from an unexpected teacher query.

·  State department of education curriculum supervisors. These supervisors can have very different roles in different states. In states where they are actively involved in delivering teacher training, they can be important allies for you. State curriculum supervisors may have calendars or mailings that can include notice of your workshop if you contact them sufficiently in advance (two to three months or more).

·  Professional associations. Affiliations vary by state, but many school administrators will be members of the American Association of School Administrators. Check www.aasa.org for a list of affiliated state organizations. Local, regional and statewide meetings of school administrators are excellent contact points. Be sure to check the applicability of your state’s economics, math and personal finance standards to concepts taught in Risky Business before meeting with administrators so that you can connect your workshop to their interest in meeting standards.

·  Teachers’ associations. Teachers in various disciplines have their own associations. It is worth some effort to find out which associations are active in your service area so that you can contact teachers in this way.

A comprehensive recruitment strategy may include any or all of the following channels:

·  Direct mailing of fliers to teacher mailing lists

·  Promotion in newsletters of your organization or others

·  Contacts through state curriculum supervisors and local curriculum directors

·  Contacts through professional associations

·  Contacts through teachers’ associations