See ASAPP Content Strategy and SciNote Customer Marketing for additional growth-related results.
Before moving into B2B marketing, I spent 15 years at UBC Physics & Astronomy as its first Marketing & Communications Manager. During this time, I fully owned the department’s Kâ12 outreach program, including its budget, hiring, training, operations, and promotion. The program was facing several challenges when I took it over and at risk of shutting down.
- Over-reliance on government grant funding that would cease within 2 years
- Inability to scale due to unstructured staff hiring and training. Its flagship activity, a children’s physics and astronomy summer camp, was run by a teacher who was completing her PhD and was graduating.
- Lack of broader awareness of the program, both locally and nationally.
I decided the goal wasn’t just to maintain the program, but to grow it. I focused on four areas:
| Challenge | What I did |
|---|---|
| Unsustainable funding | Increased pricing by 15â30% without losing subscription and expanded paid program offerings to reduce reliance on grant funding. |
| Program couldn’t scale | Built a recruiting and training process to maintain staffing levels. Each year, I hired and trained 2 teachers, 6 co-op students, and multiple part-time PhD students, while also training and coordinating 70+ volunteers for major science competitions. |
| Limited awareness and demand | Built an inbound marketing engine through newsletters, free events and programming, cross-department collaboration, and parent referrals, using free or low-cost channels to build demand for paid offerings. |
| Manual and inefficient operations | Introduced electronic payments, improved purchasing and inventory management, and moved national competitions to virtual competitions during COVID. |
Results: The increase in pricing and paid program offerings compounded to a 78% increase in revenue, allowing the program to be sustainable without external grant funding. We also scaled program participation by 3X, reaching 5K+ participants across Canada.
The outreach program became the largest university-run K-12 physics outreach program in Canada during my tenure.