Reaching Florida families at scale: Step Up For Students' multi-channel scholarship campaign

The challenge

Step Up For Students runs one of the most complex scholarship outreach programs in the country. Each year, the organization needs to reach Florida families across three distinct scholarship programs — private school tuition, personalized home education (PEP), and unique abilities support — during a compressed application window that opens in late January or February. Miss that window and families miss a year of funding. The audiences for each program are different, the messaging requirements differ by program, and Florida's media market is one of the most expensive and competitive in the nation.

The organization also had a specific gap: families considering home education through the PEP scholarship were largely unreached by traditional education media channels. Reaching them required identifying where those parents actually spend time online and building a presence there — not just scaling up existing channels. Big Sea and Cordelia Labs have partnered with Step Up For Students since 2023, with Big Sea leading campaign strategy and creative production and Cordelia Labs executing across all non-search paid media channels.

The approach

Cordelia Labs runs Step Up's paid media across connected TV, programmatic display, digital out-of-home, TikTok, Reddit, digital radio, and direct mail — roughly $200,000 in annual media investment. The channel mix is built deliberately around the application cycle: awareness phases use CTV and DOOH to build broad reach among Florida parents, while more targeted channels like Reddit and TikTok activate specific audience segments who are earlier in their consideration journey. All creative is produced in both English and Spanish to reflect Florida's bilingual family population, with Big Sea developing campaign themes and ad creative across every channel and format.

The 2024-25 cycle introduced two meaningful expansions. Reddit became the primary channel for reaching parents of home-educated students, using community-level targeting to find families in homeschool and alternative education spaces who had little prior exposure to the PEP scholarship. TikTok was added as a low-cost, high-reach channel to build awareness among younger parents, generating more than one million impressions in the first few weeks of the campaign with minimal spend. Direct mail to 38,000+ homeschool families complemented the digital effort, reaching households less likely to be engaged through digital display alone. At peak, programmatic display and DOOH combined to deliver more than 775,000 impressions in a single week during the application open period.

The results

The 2024-25 campaign delivered more than 5.6 million CTV impressions at an 84% video completion rate — a signal that the creative was holding attention, not just generating impressions. The first eight weeks of the 2025 application open phase produced more than 3.5 million impressions across display, DOOH, and TikTok. Reddit alone reached more than 140,000 parents of home-educated students, a net-new audience for the PEP program that had not been systematically reached in prior campaign cycles. [PLACEHOLDER: Insert YoY application volume increase here once confirmed with Paul. Suggested framing: "Applications for the PEP program increased X% year over year, with [X,XXX] total applications submitted during the 2024-25 cycle."]

For Step Up For Students, the numbers represent something concrete: families who found out about scholarships they didn't know they qualified for, and applied. Over three years, the program has grown in channel sophistication, audience reach, and creative quality — and the partnership continues into the 2026-27 cycle with expanded video, UGC, and bilingual content production.