Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center – Virginia RITA Business Recruitment Campaign

Through the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center was selected to administer the Virginia Rural Information Technology Apprenticeship (RITA) Grant Fund and Program. CI/CM was retained in summer 2021 to find and recruit businesses that could host apprentices.

The qualifications were strict: businesses had to work in information technology, be headquartered in one of 22 specific Virginia localities and have fewer than 100 employees. CI/CM researched potentially qualifying businesses and how best to reach them, built a RITA landing page, and ran a two-pronged digital campaign on LinkedIn and Facebook, optimizing targeting as it went. A 2022 follow-up campaign used video ads produced by CI/CM.

Results: At the start, the pool of qualifying businesses was very small and largely unknown. After the first three-month campaign, four businesses began registering with the Department of Labor; the 2022 push added three more. By spring 2023, 12 apprentices were working with IT businesses in Southwest Virginia, results the grant program’s administrators considered a success.

Services: research, landing page, LinkedIn and Facebook advertising, video production, campaign optimization

RITA promotional video

30-second video ad