In an environment where everything read as a political position, the strongest available position was the simplest true thing in the room.
Messaging → Campaign → Recruitment Marketing
New York City school politics was a war. A charter network founder in a years-long public feud with the mayor, the teachers’ unions in it, the press in it, everyone with a side. Underneath all of it was something much simpler: kids about to lose their middle school. Success Academy also needed to hire teachers, and no ordinary recruitment campaign survives an environment like that. So we didn’t soften the fight. We put it in the pitch. Applications rose 22%, and retention rose 15%, which is the number that proves it worked.
Eva Moskowitz had built New York City’s largest charter network and was in a years-long, personal, very public feud with the mayor. The teachers’ unions were in it. The press was in it. Everybody had a side, and every statement anyone made got read as a position.
Underneath all of that were families who wanted their kids in a good school, and a group of them about to lose a middle school, because the city wouldn’t give them the space.
I was on the brand and content team, working both campaigns at once, which is the reason they ended up being one campaign.
That was the campaign, and the name was the entire argument. Take out the feud, the ideology, the op-eds. What’s actually at stake is whether these specific children get to keep going to their school.
That’s a hard thing to argue with, which was the point.
In an environment where everything read as a political position, the strongest available position was the simplest true thing in the room.
Running alongside it was a recruiting problem. Success Academy needed teachers. Ordinary recruitment marketing was never going to work: open roles, join our team, apply today.
Not because it was badly made. Because it was dishonest by omission. Anyone taking a job here was walking into a fight. They’d defend it at dinner parties. They’d read things about their employer in the paper. Leaving that out gets people through the door and loses them in a year.
The instinct is to soften: lead with mission, stay above it, don’t hand anyone ammunition. We went the other way. The two campaigns ran as one voice. Kids Over Politics said in public what the organization was actually for, and the recruiting work used the same voice to tell a candidate exactly what they’d be joining.
Including that it isn’t for everyone. That’s a filter. Teachers who wanted the fight leaned in; teachers who didn’t selected themselves out, which isn’t a loss.
It’s the mechanism working.
Applications rose 22%. That’s the number people quote.
Retention rose 15%, and that’s the one that matters, because it’s the only evidence that what arrived was the right people rather than just more of them. Anyone can raise application volume. Raising it while the people who show up also stay is proof you were honest on the way in.
The work didn’t make Success Academy less controversial.
It made the controversy legible, and then let it do the sorting.
In-house at Success Academy, with the brand and content team.
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