RFP Alumni Recruitment Talent Attraction Campaign

Initiative Overview: The Greater FM EDC has been awarded a grant from the State of North Dakota to deploy a large-scale marketing initiative focused on regional talent attraction (recruiting additional workforce to the region).  

Our goal is to recruit additional talent to the region with a multi-prong marketing plan focused on workforce attraction focused on the region’s higher education alumni. As a group who has already experienced the region, we believe we can work to attract them by re-educating them about the region’s ever-evolving economy including the diversity of available high-paying jobs and excellent quality of life. We would also love to consider high school alumni as part of our target audience.  

We have provided funding for a basic framework for a marketing campaign with marketing (to include any writing, strategy management and creative), video, website updates, HubSpot workflow creation and advertising. We encourage creativity and “out-of-the-box” thinking.  

What does success look like?  

Success would mean that we have a robust marketing and ad campaign that uses data to effectively target and message alumni and pulls them into an automated marketing funnel (through HubSpot). The campaign keeps them in the funnel until they apply for a job or meet with a liaison or local champion who will assist them with their needs in hopes of having them relocate to the region. If feasible, we’d like to incorporate some surveying to determine if we’ve changed their perceptions of the region.  

The Grant: The ND Regional Workforce Impact Grant (RWIP) provides grant dollars to regional entities. According to the state website, “RWIP provides grants to regional workforce entities in North Dakota to design and implement innovative plans to address their region’s most demanding workforce challenges. The grant program is designed to encourage regions and communities to develop sustainable, innovative solutions to help businesses find workers, and help workers and jobseekers connect to jobs and communities. The RWIP grant aims to support the cost of local solutions that will have a broad impact through a community or region.  

The state grant will be awarded in three tranches, each new tranche awarded when the recipient meets an agreed upon milestone.   

The GFMEDC will manage this project along with the lead marketing firm selected. We aim to gather a collective group of professionals with a shared vision for talent attraction through a coordinated marketing plan. As such, this RFP contains several components that make up a broader talent attraction plan. These components could be fulfilled by one or many agencies/freelancers.  

Please include at the top of your application the component(s) you are interested in working on.  

Proposed Project: The overall goal is to attract alumni back to the region to fill high valued positions. While our goal is to convince people to change their zip code, we understand that starts with changing perceptions of our area with these targeted individuals and those  they may associate with. Our plan lays out several components to achieve this goal. We want to utilize the most enhanced data to monitor and prove we are changing perceptions and convincing people to move to the area.  

This project will require the primary marketing firm to take on a leadership role helping to act as a coordinator with the other vendors hired for the project and our partners in higher education.  

We’ll use those high-impact quality of life aspects to re-educate and change perceptions and sell potential residents on the benefits of our larger regional community. 

We’ll have several components to support the marketing campaign including: marketing materials for an ad campaign, landing pages, LiveinFMArea website enhancements, HubSpot Workflows, video(s) and an ad campaign.   

The ads will drive users to a landing page, where we’ll grab their contact information to place them in an automated email campaign or workflow through HubSpot.  

We will use the data and information and work with higher education and other partners to target alumni  

Using the marketing materials, we’ll pull “customers” into a funnel. Targeted communication would ultimately lead a “customer” to connect to a job page to apply for jobs or a local contact/liaison (who communicates directly with the customer). Our goal is to track the success as closely as we can to each “customer” or candidate being interested in or accepting a position in the metro. Our ultimate KPI would be a change in zip code, but we understand additional KPI’s are also important including traffic to the website, specifically the jobs board, form submissions, email open rates etc. We would want high-level reports with enough detail that our investors understand what we’re doing and how we are meeting our KPI’s.  

We anticipate that all the agencies selected will meet regularly (weekly if needed) with the GFMEDC team and the lead marketing firm and other community partners to build and track the campaign.