EDC Receives Accolades for Local Workforce Initiative

The EDC is proud to announce that we recently won a CALED Award for our Commuter Workforce Campaign. Although many of our members and community partners already know its origin story, some of you may not be aware of how the campaign performed or its impact on our local economy. I’m proud of all the efforts of our staff and supporters to make it successful, and I’m eager to share the story with you.

Available workforce is perhaps the top issue for communities and employers across the country. While many communities lack enough workers, our region has a unique challenge: 70 percent of our workforce leaves every day to work in other communities. The idea for the Commuter Workforce Campaign came from the need to address this issue. In addition to the toll it took on commuters, the daily exodus further strained our local employers, who were already struggling to fill vacancies. The campaign was designed to educate our workforce on the career opportunities within our region and to encourage them to apply for local jobs.

This issue had existed for years, but the details weren’t entirely clear. While we knew how many people were commuting, we didn’t know much else about them. We didn’t know which industries they worked in, their average wages, their level of education, or any other demographics. Getting this information would be crucial to crafting our business recruitment message. When Site Selectors were told that we had an available local workforce who wanted to ditch their commutes, they immediately asked who these workers were, but we couldn’t tell them. We contacted countless data agencies to try to find out, but the data didn’t exist yet. So the only option was to gather the data ourselves.

Using OnTheMap data from the U.S. Census, we were able to track where people were commuting to, down to the census tract level. We could then use a map search to see which employers were in those higher cluster areas of commuter destinations. Once we knew where these commuters worked, we could research their employers’ available jobs and average wages and compare them to the job openings we had in our region.

With this information, we deployed geo-targeted Google ads to the census tracts where we saw the most commuters with the highest number of equivalent job openings. We went into it feeling unsure of what type of response we would get. The ads resulted in a very high click-through rate, which allowed us to collect data on demographics like age and gender as well as where the viewers searched for open positions on our SoCal Jobs page.

The data collection for the campaign started in January of 2023 and the first Google Ad campaign launched that July. Throughout the campaign, we kept our members updated on the data gathered and how the ad performed. For the first two weeks of its run, we had 45,500 impressions and 721 clicks to the website for a 1.5% click-through rate. The average click-through rate for that type of ad is only .46%. These two weeks of campaigning cost us a mere $352.99.
Being able to bring nearly one thousand active job seekers directly to our local employers’ job boards for less than $400 was an incredible value, especially when compared to the cost of hosting a job fair and its low potential for ROI. The 45,000 views that the campaign brought in provided additional exposure for the region, the EDC, and our local employers.

We’re now running monthly campaigns to continue gathering data and market job openings to support our local employers. Thus far, the feedback has been very positive, and we’re looking to increase this effort to reach even more commuters.

Through the success of this campaign, we’ve gained support from our local partners in growing this initiative by leveraging additional dollars to fund it. The campaign only worked due to the valuable insight from local employers on their struggles with hiring and their hardest-to-fill positions. We anticipate the campaign will continue to yield benefits for our employers by filling their open vacancies, allowing them to service more clients and reducing the daytime leakage. Daytime leakage means fewer dollars spent locally. Reducing this by keeping our workers local means we’re not only helping employers with their initial workforce issue, but also keeping more dollars here to further strengthen our economy.
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I’m incredibly proud of my team for taking on this complex issue, breaking it down into achievable parts, and executing a plan that has resulted in measurable success.  As economic developers, it’s our duty to help our communities and businesses overcome challenges that they can’t on their own. The issue of local workers commuting out of our region is not entirely solved, but we’ve identified a path forward. Utilizing all that we’ve learned and the growing interest in partnership to foster this effort will help us continue to see a positive impact on our neighbors, communities, businesses, and the region.