American Federation for Children

Driving High-Quality Leads for Georgia’s Promise Scholarship

AFC needed to connect with parents in Georgia’s lowest-performing school districts — a small, hesitant audience for whom scholarship funds could be transformative. Think Big helped them reach the right families, earn their trust, and turn interest into action.

STATS

7,926

total leads — fueling AFCGF’s largest enrollment funnel in Georgia to date.

65,466

total clicks and 7.1M+ impressions — driving awareness at scale while still zeroing in on eligible families.

49%

decrease in the cost per lead from 2024 to 2025 — delivering the most efficient results AFCGF has ever seen.

7.9–9%

Google Search CTR — more than double industry benchmarks, capturing parents already actively seeking answers.

Texting CTR — driving 6,700+ unique clicks in a single round, proving to be one of the strongest enrollment drivers.

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The Challenge

The American Federation for Children Growth Fund (AFCGF) needed to reach a very specific and difficult audience: parents in Georgia’s 50 lowest-performing K-12 school districts eligible for the GA Promise Scholarship, a program offering $6,500 to help families pursue better educational opportunities, like private school.

Parents were often hesitant to move their children out of familiar schools, and the scholarship’s short enrollment window made it critical not just to capture attention, but to move families to action quickly. That required messaging that directly addressed parents’ concerns while guiding them through the process with multiple touchpoints.

Complicating matters further, the eligible audience was extremely small. Running back-to-back campaigns for nearly two years without oversaturating such a narrow group is historically difficult. By strategically scaling through retargeting, lookalikes, and cross-platform tactics, Think Big kept performance strong while continuing to gather new data and grow sign-ups.

The Approach

Think Big developed a multi-pronged paid media strategy that layered precision targeting with broad reach tactics to capture and nurture this hard-to-reach audience:

Creative Targeting & Funnel Building

Deployed a mix of interest-based targeting, lookalike audiences, and website retargeting to scale and refine engagement. Retargeting pools were built by capturing parents who had already engaged with an ad, visited the landing page, or partially filled out a form — ensuring we stayed in front of those most likely to convert without wasting spend.
Used CTV and OTT placements to seed a broad but relevant audience pool, then reallocated budget away from these higher-cost tactics once that retargeting segment was established and could be activated more efficiently on other platforms.
Expanded Google Search campaigns with high-intent keywords, reaching parents already looking for scholarship and school choice information. By pairing this with peer-to-peer texting, we combined intent with accessibility: Search captured parents actively seeking answers, while texting pushed scholarship info directly to their phones — the device where they’re most likely to engage.

Messaging & Creative Optimization

Tested multiple creative concepts and continued to build on their success with messages explicitly addressing GA parents so they felt personalized and captured their attention. Other effective messaging used urgency and calls for time sensitive responses, as well as words and phrases that heightened social pressure to apply. All other lower performing creatives were paused upon the first signs of a lagging performance, preserving every client dollar.

Adapted lessons from similar education initiatives in other states, and tested visuals (illustrations vs. photography) to see which resonated most.

Pipeline Engagement

Captured leads, both on the website and using Facebook’s native lead gen form and then properly funneled them into the client’s CRM to be tagged and passed onto AFCGF’s cultivation campaign.
Automated emails kept parents apprised on timely scholarship updates, deadline reminders, and FAQ support — reinforcing trust and reducing apprehension about applying.

Through continuous optimization, we balanced scale, cost efficiency, and lead quality — a trifecta that had historically been elusive.

The Results

The Summer 2025 campaign not only drove record-breaking lead volume but parents engaged with AFCGF’s follow-up emails at historic open rates, validating that these were the right families ready to act on the opportunity.

By blending innovative audience building, relentless message testing, and smart budget reallocation, Think Big delivered:

More engaged leads at a lower cost per lead than any prior campaign.
A highly scalable targeting strategy void of audience fatigue that AFCGF can replicate in future enrollment cycles.
An enrollment funnel filled with parents who are most likely to take the desired actions.