Marketing with A3 – Declining Workshop Attendance (Right side)

Yesterday I did a blog post, Marketing with A3 – Declining Workshop Attendance (left side). Today is the right side of the A3 or the Do-Check-Action side. (Sample A3). Below is an example and the completion of this problem solving A3.

Marketing with A3

A3 Problem Solving Report

Overview from yesterday:

Control #: 10-2300

Team: Workshop Marketing Team Date: 4/15/10

Title/Theme: A3PS – Declining Workshop Attendance

Background/Definition: In the past, we have averaged 80% capacity in workshop attendance. The past several years we have noticed a significant decline in attendance to only 50% capacity. We have tried increased PR, Advertising and new Social media ventures. Without an increase in attendance we will have to either reduce the program size or cut one of the cities from the program.

Countermeasures: Countermeasures are the actions steps you are considering. This is a good time to start brainstorming and then organizing your thought process. Pick out the best ideas and create a criteria matrix to evaluate the ideas. In our example below we selected seven countermeasures and evaluated them.

We chose 4 of the 7 to implement: Telephone Solicitations, Purchase Database (mail and phone numbers), Advertise in Hospital Newsletters and Direct Mail in support of solicitations and follow-up. The implementation plan started 120 days prior to the workshop.

Implementation: Bill worked out a payment plan with the call center if they met their targets, which would mean that we would meet our gap of 30%, they would receive a bonus of an additional $800 bringing their total to $4,000. On the other hand if we did not reach 15% of our gap that could be directly attributed to them our payment would be $2,500 versus the $3,200.

Follow up:

We failed to meet our goal of 30% but came very close at a 25% increase in attendance.
Though we had high hopes for the call center, we felt that their efforts fell short and required us to make direct phone calls and follow ups after their initial conversations and our follow-up mailings. We ended up paying them $3,000
The added increases in participants were primarily from the healthcare related fields. The other areas still stayed sluggish and in fact may have even dropped slightly.
The local advertising that Jennifer created proved to be an excellent source of leads. We felt that a dedicated phone line in the future with the option of talking to a live person or requesting information through automation may assist us in the future.
Lack of testimonials from like professionals would have helped us especially from leaders in the healthcare field. We did gather a few at the conference to assist us in future workshops.
As a result of this A3, we recommended and received approval to update all databases.