On May 13, the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), in collaboration with GMMB and with the support of several funders, launched the Do The FAFSA campaign, a major national digital effort direct to Pell Grant-eligible young people encouraging them complete the Free Application for
Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. The campaign’s goal is to encourage an additional 375,000 students to complete the FAFSA by August 31 and to connect them with resources to help them fill out the form.
The paid advertising campaign is running across various mediums, including social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, and other platforms like Gray Media (mobile gaming) and Condé Nast, to reach students and their families
where they are. In the first month, the campaign delivered 51,038,800 ad impressions and 199,424 clicks to fafsa.gov, yielding a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.39% – surpassing the CTR benchmark range of 0.07%-0.15% for combined tactics.
In addition to paid advertising, the campaign offers a free-to-use social media toolkit (available in both English and Spanish) that many NCAN members and friends are deploying on their
own channels. The toolkit contains pre-drafted posts, videos, and graphics for Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn, as well as an informational one-pager, that are designed for anyone to use and customize. During the first half of
June, 976 users viewed the toolkit over 1,100 times, with the vast majority of users using the Facebook and Instagram posts.
On social media itself, NCAN, postsecondary institutions, national and state educational organizations, and other partners and advocates in the higher education space have been widely sharing organic (i.e., unpaid) #DoTheFAFSA posts. X/Twitter was particularly
active, with 117 posts from 72 unique authors shared.
The #DoTheFAFSA campaign runs through August, and NCAN will continue to update you as the summer progresses. The importance of this campaign is underscored by recent FAFSA completion data from NCAN’s FAFSA Tracker that shows the national completion rate was only up 0.6% for the week ending June 14- 8.7% behind the class of 2023. Given this, it seems likely we'll wind up down 7% by June 30 at 46.4%.
Email to a Friend