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Transcript of NTA Conference Call Presentation held on 07/24/96

Social Marketing Strategies

Presented by

Richard Horne
Academy for Educational Development

In your jobs, most of you are already marketers. You have clients, you listen to them, you offer services, and you make changes in your services to please your clients. You may lower your price or your bid to please them and to compete with other organizations, firms, agencies, or institutions doing the same activities you are. You have different kinds of clients you respond to in different ways. You conduct market research; you listen to constituencies who are constantly telling you what they want, where the gaps in services are, where the gaps in products or services are, etc. In essence, your clients point out new markets and opportunities. You do public relations and develop products to meet new demands that your clients tell you about. You package products, such as school-to-work manuals or directories of information about promising practices or polices. You package services - services for school-to-work systems, training and technical assistance, information sharing, etc. You also try to establish a unique, competitive position in the marketplace. You try to position yourself in the school-to-work world above your competition. So many of us are actually superb marketers already. Today's brief discussion, in less than 30 minutes, is not about making anyone into a marketer. It's about developing a common vocabulary or perspective about marketing that might be useful to you as you engage new challenges in your leadership role, as someone responsible for building, conducting, and promoting school-to-work programs in your state, or your region.

Today we're briefly going to discuss marketing perspectives, some general definitions, some general principles about marketing, and some tips and strategies that we have to be successful. Most of these will be general, so they can be transferred into the specific lists and categories that you might be able to share with others. I hope that this will be sufficient time for you to share your strategies and experiences, marketing stories, outreach stories, as well as to ask some questions and perhaps exchange some useful information.

First of all, terms. Terms are important, especially when we think about the role of marketing and how marketing can play a role in the work that we do. As you'll see later on in our discussion, my perspective on marketing and the process has enhanced the work that I do and changed my beliefs about education, about how people learn, and about how we go about the job of influencing human behavior. I'm sure all of you have had conversations about marketing. Many of you have probably hired marketing firms or consultants. You've certainly heard all of the terms, terms like marketing, selling, promoting, target audiences, segmentation, product, competition, positioning, price, sales source, sales material, audience research, multi-media, etc. These are useful terms, and it is probably useful to use these concepts in the same way - and it is possible - that professional marketers use them.

Let me introduce you to the concept of marketing through a story of two young men. I'd like you all to draw some pictures in your mind of the scene as I go through this story. There were two young men, both students at prestigious universities. They were both on their way home to, let's say, New York City for the holidays. Both students, of course, are hard-working. They study all day long, so money is a big problem for them. They are really without money, and they have decided that the best way to get home for the holidays is the good old-fashioned way - they're going to hitchhike home. They both have a behavioral problem which they are trying to solve, a marketing problem: How will they get someone to actually stop, pick them up, and take them home to New York for the holidays? Student #1 takes a time-honored and well-tested approach to the problem. He stands at a highway entrance, his thumb extended in the air, and holds up a big sign with big block letters. That sign says in big capital letters, "TO NEW YORK." Now student #2 has taken a couple of marketing classes at this great university, and he has decided to use his newly-acquired marketing skills to see if they can help him get a ride quicker. He begins by thinking about his audience. Who is actually behind the wheel of all those cars that might stop by and pick him up? What are the reasons that might make them not stop? What are the mental barriers that stop people from picking up hitch-hikers? What goes through their minds - fear, insecurity, embarrassment, boredom? Who is most like to pick the hitch-hiker up? Out of all these people, which ones does he have the best chance to appeal to? In market terms, who is the target audience, who is his particular audience segment, and what benefits might he offer this group that would appeal especially to those drivers? This second student settles on an older generation and decides that his segment is the over-50 market. He decides that they might like a bright young man with a real sense of humor, and maybe a little something else. So finally, what does this man decide to say, and how does he get his message across, given his limited resources? He does the first thing as our first young man. He makes a big sign with big block letters and stands at the highway entrance, his thumb extended. But his sign reads: "TO MOM'S HOUSE FOR CHRISTMAS." Right? - exciting, simple, good marketing scheme. Did I tell you, though, our young marketer is also an 'A' student? He knows that no good idea should go untested in the marketplace. During his pretest, which he conducts with a few of his friends, he discovers, of course, that he made a huge mistake. Does anybody have an idea of what that mistake was? He said, "TO MOM'S HOUSE FOR CHRISTMAS," but he never said where he was going. Clever as his idea was, in marketing it's very important to be clear and accurate. And if it is important in getting a ride to New York City, you can imagine how important clarity and accuracy are in a areas such as health education, particularly in preventing teenage smoking, alcohol or drug abuse, or teenage pregnancy. It's equally important in promoting successful transition for all students from school to work. His message was clever, but not complete. So our hero, after his market research, finally comes up with a message that might appeal to his audience. His sign is corrected to read, "TO MOM'S HOUSE FOR CHRISTMAS (NEW YORK)."

What's the point? - the point is quite simple. Marketing has many components. It is (a) audience-centered, designed to offer benefits that people want and to reduce barriers that they worry about, (b) research-driven, (c) uses clear, clever, and persuasive communication, and (d) not necessarily expensive. Marketing is not a $1 million budget. It's a way of thinking about our job and the job of making your claim. In our perspective at the Academy, that has certainly been our experience. Marketing is about how you think about a problem. It's how you try to influence it. Marketing is not about selling ideas to people. It is about coming up with ideas and programs that sell themselves - ideas that come from people, ideas that are packaged into programs and then given back to the communities they come from.

We have a short time today, and there is no way in 20 minutes we could go through all of the twists and turns of marketing. But I'd like to give you a concise overview of the marketing process that we here at AED have used in the past. The process that we have used is called Social Marketing. Social Marketing has been around since the 1950's. It's not new, and it's not the latest fad. There are many textbooks, research, and resource materials available on the topic. There are even some courses in universities around the country that talk about Social Marketing. We know a lot about it. Social Marketing is not a "quick fix," nor does it provide "quick and dirty" answers to a tough problem. Instead, it's a long-term way of thinking about people and their behavior. Social Marketing is not just about images and advertisements; it's not just powerful communication. Certainly, memorable images and messages are part of Social Marketing, but Social Marketing differs significantly from Social Advertising. Social Marketing is the result of thinking about audiences, benefits, and barriers in a way similar to that of the young man in the story. Social Marketing, however, does borrow and adapt many ideas and tools from traditional marketing.

First, to go back and examine marketing, the marketing mind is organized around five basic concepts. You've all heard them. As old and tired as they are, without understanding what they are and how they interact, it would be difficult to understand marketing and apply that to our jobs. These concepts are: product, place, price, promotion, and people. Later, I will go through a specific example that describes these concepts and applies them in the Social Marketing context.

People: First let's talk about people. Marketing is people-oriented. We talk about target audiences. An audience is a group of people who share a common set of perceptions about an offering. They are a subset of a market. There are demographics that we look at. Demographics are helpful, such as age, gender, ethnicity. We may look at life-style. Marketers today know how audiences see themselves emotionally. We know about segments, what audiences are interested in when they fall into those segments, how they feel and think about problems.

Product: We also think about what the product and its possible benefits are. A product is an offering or a service; something that you offer in order to get what you want. Sometimes a product is referred to by the professionals as an offering, sometimes it's a channel. How do people take that advice? What are the barriers to getting that product? What is the competition? What are people going to like most about this kind of product or advice? When we talk about the barriers, we're talking about the position of our product in that market. What do people have to give up in order to get this product? What are the other things that compete against this product?

Place: When we talk about place, we're talking about the supply and distribution of products. We're talking about specific areas of the country. We're talking about segments that share broad common needs or desires. We're talking about the kinds of clients we have.

Promotion/Price: When we look at promotional strategies, we begin to talk about marketing and its comparisons to selling. Most people think of selling as selling a better mousetrap or a better product and trying to say that "mine is better than theirs, therefore, I will sell it." Sellers demonstrate the advantages of their product. They may get testimonials from leading experts, they may give you a price break, they may send you a message on television, etc. Promotion is often what the general public thinks about marketing, but there are several components to promotion. One is advertising - asking mass media to get a product or message out. Another component might be a public relations or advocacy strategy that might use the media with some kind of event to improve a broad image or a policy. People use promotional events, staging events, give-aways, contests, gimmicks, etc. Promotion also involves personal selling via a sales force, on-site visits, direct marketing. There is also interactive selling, which we see now on the hot new web sites on the internet and all of the television commercials where people are selling their products as a way to get their messages out.

Again, marketing looks at the four basic ways that marketers get you to buy something: product, price, place, and promotion.

In our experience at the Academy in designing marketing and outreach activities, we have focused on specific social problems or challenges. And it is this focus which marks our departure from the more mainstream marketing tactics. In this model the process includes five phases.

1. Identifying the social problem or challenge.
2. Defining the audience.
3. Analyzing the benefits and barriers to the behavior problem in relation to the target audience and the competition.
4. Designing and testing a marketing strategy.
5. Employing proven communications and promotional approaches and marketing tactics.

Phase 1: Identifying the social problem or challenge.
I'd like to share with you an example of how we've employed this process to solve a social problem or challenge. We had a challenging experience in the area of educational reform, specifically with parental involvement in public education. Our goal was to improve student success by getting parents more involved in school. The social marketer would typically begin with the problem of people, getting as much existing data as possible to determine which parents participate least, and why. I pulled together some data, some of it real, some imaginary, to show you how we think about this type of a problem.

Let's imagine for a moment that I've asked parents who don't participate in school, "Why do you not participate?" Answers like these have emerged: 51% said, "I'm too busy"; 30% said, "I don't feel welcome at school"; 17% said, "I feel embarrassed to go to school"; 2% said, "I don't care." Let me remind you that this is a hypothetical example, just to illustrate the process of social marketing in action. From these hypothetical data, the "too busy" group clearly appears to be the most important, accounting for 51% of the explanation.

Phase 2: Defining the audience.
As social marketers, we're looking at the targets of greatest opportunity for "profit" - not only sales in education but an education profit. Here profit is indicated by successful students and sales are indicated by the number of parents who participate. What we care about is students' performance as a function of parents' participation. That means we need to know this: among the kids having the most problems in schools, what do their parents give us as explanations for not participating? What is the distribution of students having problems compared to parents' explanations for not participating. This is a marketing way to look at the problem and give us a different insight into the solution.

Now, of all of the students having problems, let's assume that 15% of the parents said "I'm too busy"; 10% said, "I don't feel welcome at school"; 53% said, "I feel embarrassed go to school"; and only 2% said, "I don't care." The "too busy" group is the largest in terms of parents who are not participating overall, but their kids seem to be doing much better. Reaching these parents won't help our "sales" much, and won't help us help students who are doing badly in school. But 53% of the students with problems have parents who say they are too embarrassed to get involved in school. A social marketer would argue to go for profits, not sales; remember profit is equated here with successful students, and sales with the number of parents participating in school. Since the parents of the kids having the most problems really care about students' performance in school, our biggest pay-off for the least effort will be from working with the "too embarrassed" segment of parents.

Phase 3: Analyzing the benefits and barriers to the behavior problem in relation to the target audience and the competition.
The next step would be to work with the local schools and communities to identify small groups of the "too embarrassed" segment of parents and conduct some qualitative audience research with them. What we want to get behind this answer is to understand what's going on. We'd be looking to fill in a matrix. What benefits, both educational and non-educational benefits, would parents like to get out of participating in school? What barriers led to their embarrassment? Again, when we look at educational barriers, but also other barriers we might not anticipate, perhaps these parents are embarrassed because they don't have time to change clothes before going to school after work, or because they are afraid they will be asked questions they don't understand, or chided for their child's problems. This kind of research uses a variety of techniques. For example, focus groups are a popular technique. One particular questioning technique that is useful we call "event mapping." Using a set of sequenced questions, we would ask parents to give a detailed description of a similar event - a visit to school, or a meeting with other parents - some event the group members have actually experienced in the past. We ask them to talk about the event and their feelings about it. We might ask, Do you ever go to school for a meeting? Do you remember why you decided to go? Did your child say anything to you that made a difference that time? What were you hoping would happen at the meeting? What do you remember most about that particular visit?

After these and many other questions about how best to begin to understand the benefits people want to get, barriers they worry about most, and the channels of information they trust and like, people who share benefits, barriers, and channels can then be grouped together in coherent audience segments with a particular profile and personality. They are no longer stereotypic paper dolls, but real people whose context we can understand much better. Understanding the benefits and barriers people care about leads to the development of a product. A "product" is not always the bottle of perfume or the can of soup or the Coca-Cola or the box of cat-food. A product is really the solution to a problem a particular audience segment has. It might be a solution to controversial behavior, such as teenage smoking, pregnancy or drunk driving, etc. In our example of the embarrassed parent, the solution may be a "product" such as a parents' job cooperative. A cooperative might meet the parent's needs to meet some other adults at school who might help the parent to get a job; it might help the parent understand access points in the community to solve problems that the parent might be having in the community; and/or it might be a solution to a barrier that some parents feel is important. Sometimes parents feel, "I never have anything to contribute, and I don't know much about school subjects." If they are included in a cooperative, that group might facilitate the parent's involvement in their child's education by reducing that barrier. That one example has helped us shift some of our thinking about how we approach some problems through the lens of social marketing.

Phase 4: Designing and testing a marketing strategy.
I want to share with you briefly some strategies. We talked about the promotion strategy. There are several steps that we like to take. We want to answer such questions as, What is the state of the audience? What channels do we use? Who is the most influential person to promote our product? We want to outline our objectives to clarify what the promotion is designed to do. We want to be clear about who our particular segment of the audience is for this promotion activity. We want to outline and identify the key audience benefit, why they should take this advice or participate in this program, what's in it for them, from their perspective. Support is important. It gives the audience a reason to believe the message is important to them. Tone and manner are also important. The statements or the commercial campaigns that you put out might have an emotional appeal, but it has to be consistent with their benefits and the support that you are offering. When you look at channels, you have to look at the channels that are available, the channels that are most credible and trusted, and the channels that you have the greatest access to.

Phase 5: Employing proven communications and promotional approaches and marketing tactics.
Often people will talk about communication promotion or persuasion tactics. I'd like to leave you with seven. One is to promote any benefit of your program or your practice or your product. Some people have found that in looking at barriers and benefits it is often useful to play down the benefits of a competitor. Many tactics use comparison. They might compare the benefits of your program to the barriers of another program. We have all seen humor used in persuasion or communication tactics. Humor is good and can be a useful tool. Many groups identify spokespersons or allies from their target audience to get their message across. Also, you have to give people a reason to believe in you, and you have to make sure that the message promotes equality for all people. In our field, we have found that social marketing and other marketing campaigns rely on us to be creative; they ask us to think small until we have identified a big idea. Often we can change the battlefield. As an example, with the parents, we may have to move from a direct message of asking them to come and be involved in their child's education to creating a structure and a place for the parents who, in this case, were embarrassed to come to school, such that they could feel safe and could get information that was of benefit to them. Pick something that you can win at. Building alliances among your core groups is also important. Remember that a good campaign is always finding benefits that beat out the competition.

Finally, I'd like to leave you with some ideas about why some products or some programs don't succeed. Often programs do not offer unique benefits, or they may offer too many benefits. A program may have no single strong reason for being around. A unique benefit may never be identified; the program's value may not be shown. Often when this happens in our arenas, we're way ahead of our audiences. We are too innovative, too ahead of our time. Often, programs fail because they don't work, or they don't deliver what they promised. They might be directed toward the wrong audience or introduced at the wrong time. Often, products might be introduced as too expensive or might demand too much effort from people to use them. They can be introduced to the wrong people, or positioned incorrectly. There might not be a good match-up of problems with the target audience. A program can fail because it doesn't have a distinct personality or image to separate it from its competition. Often, the people who are employed in the program or practice might not be familiar with it or its customers. There is no trust by the audience. A campaign or a message put out might not resonate with the group because it doesn't have someone they trust identified with it. The product might be placed before too many people who have to decide about the purchase.

Some of these tips and strategies have been useful to us. I hope that this brief summary is useful to you and would be happy to share with you some of our stories about campaigns that we have used to involve students with disabilities in inclusive settings, etc., if that would be useful to you. I'd like to pause now and let people ask questions or pose problems that they may be experiencing in their states. Perhaps an exchange of ideas among the participants might be helpful. Does anyone have a question or a comment? It's difficult to cover a lot of material in 20 minutes. It's usually a 2-3 hour workshop.

Questions and Anwers

Richard Horne: How many people out there have had experience in trying to deliver public service announcements?

Patty (sitting in with Melanie Eick, Oklahoma): We have used public service announcements extensively in the past. In fact, I come from a television background and was a TV reporter, so I'm familiar with PSA. I don't know about other states, but in ours we do a pretty good job of developing public service announcements. Getting them placed is not difficult, but getting them aired is becoming at times a lot more difficult, since the FCC no longer requires commercially licensed stations to run a certain quota of spots, as they used to do. Now, when stations do run public service announcements, they tend to be more of what I would call "life and limb" spots. They tend to deal with topics, such as AIDS awareness, fire safety, child abuse hotlines, things like that. Disabilities is always a good one, but they don't run many about specific programs, strategies, or service provider offerings. Even in social services, there aren't a lot of public service announcements anymore, at least in our state.

Richard Horne: What strategies have you used to try to get your message aired?

Patty: First of all, we generally get a credible spokesperson as the person in the PSA. For instance, we have a series of school-to-work public service announcements right now, and we use our own Miss America. The platform, of course, is school-to-work, so that provides the celebrity as well as the credibility. Because of who she is, and because she is from our state, those announcements received some significant play. But just general vocational education ones where we've used celebrities, though they are worth the effort, have not had as much [airtime].

Richard Horne: Have you talked to the television stations?

Patty: Yes.

Richard Horne: And to the people in your state who make the decisions about airing public service announcements?

Patty: Yes. But times have changed. Different strategies meet with different success at different times. When I worked in television, it was required that a certain number of them be placed, so there was always a plethora.

Richard Horne: Let me share with you what we did in one campaign. You may not be familiar with the National Information Center for Children and Youth with Disabilities (NICHCY). We faced the same problem in getting our public service announcements aired nationally. Two or three years ago, we put together a social marketing activity. For this, we decided that our target audience was going to be the people who make decisions about airing public service announcements. We went out and talked with them a great deal. We did interviews and focus groups about how they made those decisions. We found out a lot of interesting things. The first thing we found out, and I think you've addressed this, had to do with the format and content of the PSA itself. We learned a lot about how to package our PSA, and we actually put together a cassette that had a series of public service announcements with three different messages on it, each in formats for different time segments. We have 10-second, 15-second, 30-second, and one-minute public service announcements around our three message areas. One message was on school-to-work, one on early childhood, and one on NICHCY. We packaged the PSA on a cassette, and we learned that who delivered the public service announcements to the stations was critical. If we delivered it through the mail, we found that we were less likely to be successful in getting the public service announcement aired. So we put together a mailing and promotional package and delivered it to parent advocates in all of the target markets where we wanted the public service announcement aired. We worked with those parent organizations and those parents and asked them to deliver the public service announcements to the television studios and to do some activities over the course of a six-week period to try to get them aired. We were astounded by the results of those two packaging ideas. We were quite successful in getting the public service announcement aired in the markets that we had targeted. We also found that we were building a lot of coalitions among parent advocates with the messages we were trying to put out about NICHCY. So our lesson was similar to yours. Talking with the people we wanted to have an impact on meant talking with the people who made the decisions to air the announcements. That was one strategy that we used to get them aired. Has anyone else used an innovative or creative strategy with their public outreach campaign?

Susan McAlonan (Colorado): I don't know if this strategy is innovative, but we hired a local newscaster to do our video and then did three PSAs. That station adopted school-to-career for a year and is going to be involved in our outreach and marketing, as well as doing some more in-depth looks at school-to-career and airing our public service announcements.

Richard Horne: Has anyone had luck on tracking the responses that they might have gotten to public service announcements? I know that's a problem and a real challenge.

Bob (South Carolina): We've had a PSA developed here, and we got a contract with the Broadcasters Association of South Carolina. That's really helped us. We've gotten over $100,000 of free air time in about four months. We even seem to be getting some prime time, around noon and in the evening hours in some good stations with PSAs for our videos, and we're also getting good radio coverage. That's been helpful to us, to put some money into the Broadcasters Association in doing marketing.

Richard Horne: That's an excellent idea and a great way of building those alliances. You also mentioned using radio public service announcements. From our experience, that's certainly a wise use of resources and a good way of hitting markets, particularly people who don't speak English and other minority markets we couldn't reach through traditional television channels.

Susan McAlonan: We have received a lot of press from the newspapers. One of our strategies has been working with John Nelson, CEO of Norwest Banks in Colorado. He's made it part of the Norwest mission to work in every community with school-to-career. So, a high-profile businessperson has attracted a lot of media attention, particularly newspaper, but also some television.

Richard Horne: Yes, a message delivered by a person the community trusts, someone they know and recognize, is effective.

Teri Wallace: Does anyone have ideas of effective strategies to reach the business employer community, specifically regarding school-to-work?

Richard Horne: How about you, Susan, do you find that getting active involvement from business is a need in your state?

Susan McAlonan: We have a kind of multi-level strategy. Certainly, having a large company take this on has been helpful, not that we have a lot of employment in these companies, because 80% of our employment is in small and medium-size businesses. We're a rural state. But having somebody who says to their presidents, like John Nelson at Norwest Banks, "You will be the business leader of school-to-career, in your community" - and he has 80 community banks statewide - has been very helpful. That's one strategy, and we're doing a lot of things to engage businesses. The bottom line is that it has to be beneficial to business. We're looking at partnership in a new way. It's not partnership to help out education, but partnership as mutually beneficial. So we have to work with business on how this will change the amount of training they do, how it will help with retention in the workplace, how it will help them get a higher quality worker. We're not back to the same kind of partnership of just, "We're going to help this school," or "We're going to adopt this school." That's our challenge in Colorado.

Richard Horne: That's an excellent example of changing the battlefield. Would anyone like to tell about some strategies or activities they're currently using to promote the involvement of students with disabilities in their schools or system, how they are included in your informational promotional campaign, what strategies have worked, and what assistance you might need?

Someone (New Hampshire): We spent this spring getting ready to put on a training not only for special educators but adult service programs in our territory, which covers five schools in southern New Hampshire in a partnership. We developed a resource manual about adult services and we've had problems with the special educators to specifically target them to learn about school-to-work issues and how we can tie the IEP into a format that is happening in the schools. We at Vocational Rehabilitation are in the process of preparing a training this fall for educators and adult services individuals on writing school-to-work transition grants. We have not been as successful at those. So we're very busy, but we also have a long way to go.

Susan McAlonan: We have a couple of things we also would like to ask for some help with. One of the things that we did with our Systems Change Transition project is to make sure that they're integrally involved in the local and state efforts. When a local community applies for school-to-career, or school-to-work funds, the local interagency team - and we have a governing board structure - works on writing that application and has to sign off on every application that comes in. That guarantees the linkage with adult community agencies and also with special education. One of the things we would like to see at the national level is some public service messages that link youth with disabilities to school-to-career. We're particularly interested in the focus on employers and involving employers. As more students are out in the community with work-based learning, we're going to have competition for more employment. We need to highlight now that people with disabilities are excellent employees and that employers should see them as an advantage as we move into creating a system. It's something that we'll do in Colorado probably ourselves.

Richard Horne: That's exactly what we're working on the most in the National Transition Alliance.

Susan McAlonan: So we don't have to do it?

Richard Horne: Right.

Susan McAlonan: What a relief!

Richard Horne: I may actually be calling you and anyone else who'd like to join this little discussion group about some ideas that we're sharing now with the business community to try to create these materials and make them available in different formats and at different levels for the state to use. Is that something that other states would find useful?

Mary Weiberg(Iowa): Is Roberta Ginavan still on? I think Iowa would be interested in participating in that, speaking on behalf of Roberta, in our school-to-work team.

Someone (New Hampshire): I second that.

Richard Horne: If you'd like to send me an e-mail message expressing your interest in what we're going to be doing on the products on that kind of a side, my e-mail address is rhorne@aed.org.

[gap on tape]

Someone: what you needed to in the very brief amount of time that you have. I found it very helpful to hear this approach on social marketing. Thank you very much.

Richard Horne: I did prepare remarks, because I hoped they would be helpful. I do a whole series of one-day or two-day workshops on social marketing, but I get nervous when people just throw the term around, because they confuse it with social advertising. That's not what social marketing is. It's a real thought process. If you'd like, I can try to put some hand-outs on social marketing. Sometimes that's helpful, although sometimes it is as useful to talk with people about it and how to use it. You can also reach me by phone (202) 884-8209.

Teri Wallace: I'd like to refer people to our web sites. There are two addresses. For the National Transition Alliance, which has links to the National Transition Network, TRI, AED, and others, the address is http://www.aed.org/Transition/Alliance/NTA.html. The web site address for the National Transition Network, which will include a transcript of this national teleconference soon is http://www.ici.umn.edu/NTN. There are two additional sessions coming up. The dates are not set yet. Please watch your mail. I'll get them out to you as soon as possible. One will be on employer partnerships in school-to-work, and one on state highlights on how states are seeking inclusion of youth with disabilities in school-to-work. We're looking forward to those. If people want to get in touch with me, my e-mail address and phone number are on all the letters and flyers I've sent out. My colleagues here at the National Transition Network, Mary Mack, David R. Johnson, or Megan Dushin, and I would like to hear about topics that are of interest or importance to you that you'd like to have as teleconference subjects. We hope to make the teleconferences as relevant and useful to you as possible, so we'd like to hear from all of you. Thank you all for participating.

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