Central Vermont Adult Education
The Challenge
Central Vermont Adult Education (CVAE) helps adult learners across the region take the next step in their education, finishing a diploma, building new skills, or starting down a new career path. With rolling enrollment and a mission built on meeting students exactly where they are, CVAE has always relied on word of mouth and community trust to fill its programs.
CVAE had run one paid campaign on their own before partnering with TWC, but wanted to go further, specifically to reach a younger student audience beyond who their existing outreach was already connecting with. Without a dedicated strategy behind creative, targeting, and budget pacing, it was hard to know which levers actually moved the needle, or how to consistently bring in new students alongside the team's ongoing manual outreach.
Services Provided
The Results
127 leads generated over a 91-day flight at a blended cost of $43.98 per lead, giving CVAE's team a steady, predictable stream of prospective students to follow up with.
204,945+ impressions and 28,000+ unique reach, putting CVAE's programs in front of a significantly larger audience than their previous self-run campaign.
36 new Facebook page likes and 9 new Instagram follows, building CVAE's organic community alongside the paid results and laying the groundwork for future organic reach.
The Strategy
A data-driven approach that doubled down on what worked and cut what didn't, while building in room to reach the audience CVAE wanted most.
Let the Data Pick the Winning Format
We tested multiple creative styles early in the flight and quickly saw talking-head video, featuring real CVAE students speaking directly to camera, pull away from every other format. When creative fatigue set in mid-flight, we paused the campaign for three weeks to produce a fresh round of the same winning format rather than recycling tired ads, then relaunched with client-approved additional budget to support it.
Early performance showed Facebook consistently outperforming Instagram on both efficiency and volume. Rather than splitting budget evenly across platforms out of habit, we scaled Instagram delivery back mid-flight and concentrated spend on Facebook, where it was actually converting.
Focus Budget Where Results Live
Build for the Audience They Wanted
At CVAE's request, we launched a dedicated ad set targeting adults 18–34, a demographic the college specifically wanted to reach but hadn't connected with through past efforts. Paired with lookalike audiences built from CVAE's own student and inquiry base (which consistently outperformed broader interest-based targeting), this let us expand CVAE's reach into new audiences without sacrificing the cost-efficiency driven by their most engaged groups.
Testimonial
Thank you for this wonderful breakdown! We've fully brought on 4 new students from the campaign so far, and I'm very pleased with that. Our students need a lot of touch points. It looks like we've picked up dozens of new followers too, which is awesome — I now have some emails to send.
— Brian, CVAE