Workforce Intelligence Network

Client objective: The Workforce Intelligence Network, a collaboration between nine community colleges, seven workforce boards and economic development partners, wanted to connect business leaders with its workforce education resources. It partnered with Crain's Detroit Business Custom Media for its editorial expertise, understanding, influence and reach into the business community.

Solution: Crain's Detroit Business Custom Media created a multimedia campaign called “The WIN Report” to highlight the gap between what employees are being trained for and the evolving skills businesses need.

Each week, Crain's pens and designs a series of original stories highlighting the data behind the Detroit area workforce. One story pointed out that $1.9 billion in wages is likely to go unspent in 2014 based on the number of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) positions that are posted compared to the very small number of qualified employees.

The stories are displayed as native advertising in a weekly Crain's Detroit Business editorial email distributed to its business readers.

The custom stories are also used for a newsletter created for the client and sent to the client's mailing list each month.

Results: • The native content created for WIN was adjacent to editorial content and included in 2.2 million email messages with 600,000 views. • Crain's Detroit Business deployed a WIN Report marketing campaign, delivering more than 500,000 ad impressions. • The open rate of WIN's own e-newsletter was increased from 20 percent open rate to a 40 percent open rate, well above national benchmarks.