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To explain what Aprosae does, let’s say a Center for Independent Living wants to create a brochure that gets the word out about what a CIL is and the five core services it offers to their community. The CIL will likely hire an advertising agency or marketing freelancer to do this. But the agency probably hasn’t heard about what CILs do, let alone understand the culture and needs of People with Disabilities. So, the CIL has to meet with the agency to teach them about CILs and PWD. The CIL must gather information that will go into the brochure. The CIL must advise on appropriate photo choices and wording. These meetings aren’t free, even if the cost for the agency’s time is wrapped into the total cost for producing a brochure, which the national average can be anywhere from several hundred to $1,500. And, after the agency delivers the finished brochure, CIL staff are none the wiser on how to create the next publication they need, whether it be a peer support flyer or annual report.
Aprosae seeks to change this by teaching CIL staff, through a series of webinars with professional feedback, how to do this themselves. This webinar series costs half of what the lowest national average cost is for a brochure. And Aprosae’s webinars are created and conducted by a CIL employee who knows CILs’ needs and tailors the training to the world of Independent Living and PWD.
In the example of the brochure webinar series, Aprosae will not only teach CILs the basics of brochure creation, like format options, software programs, what content should go on each panel, layout, design, printing, and distribution, but CIL staff will also be provided a template with instructions on how to implement all these steps. Not only does this save the CIL money in the production of a brochure, but now the CIL has an in-house resource who has a growing understanding of publications for the next annual report, flyer, or issue brief that the CIL wants to create. The more training CIL staff attend, the more independent they become from having to pay top dollar to a marketing agency, whether it’s a brochure, a social media plan, or a plan on how to obtain free media coverage.
Another advantage to using Aprosae’s webinar trainings on marketing is that each webinar series is on a topic, like brochures, social media plans, or branding. If CILs don’t have a dedicated employee for their marketing efforts, they can assign a staff person who has several hours a week to devote to marketing and send that person to the webinar series. This way CILs don’t have to hire an additional person for marketing that they may not have the funding for. With webinars being the delivery method for the training, there also aren’t any travel costs or days out of the office.
Since there’s a large gap in CILs understanding Marketing and Marketing agencies understanding CILs, on top of the fact that CILs generally don’t have funding for a Marketing agency’s costs, Aprosae was created to be a small boutique agency for CILs, focused on training CILs to create and distribute Marketing plans and projects themselves. This allows CILs to learn about, and participate in, Marketing efforts at an affordable cost.
Aprosae’s hope is that CILs won’t just advocate for People with Disabilities, they’ll also advocate for their CIL through Marketing to their communities. If you’d like to learn more, please send us a message or visit our training page.