Ethos Music Center

Brand and Communications Strategy, AMA Portland Agency Program

Ethos is a nonprofit community music school in North Portland where lessons start at zero dollars. That is not a marketing angle. It is the actual price. The problem is that almost nobody knows it. People who find Ethos don’t know it is a nonprofit. People who know it is a nonprofit don’t know about the sliding scale. People who know about the sliding scale don’t know there are group classes, adult programs, twenty-two instruments and a bilingual summer camp. Every layer of that is a missed enrollment, and the organization has one part-time marketing staffer and a budget under thirty thousand dollars.

I joined a nine-person volunteer team through the American Marketing Association’s Portland Agency Program. I co-led the demographic and channel research deliverable, auditing every channel the organization owns and building the audience and channel strategy that anchored the work. The finding that shaped everything was that awareness isn’t binary. It is layered, so the campaign had to move people through the stack rather than assume they were already partway up it. A second finding also mattered: some audiences should not be reached through paid social at all. Immigrant and refugee families are dealing with real safety concerns, and trusted community intermediaries are the way to reach them. Recommending less direct outreach was the right call, even though it makes the less impressive slide. I am now co-leading the marketing campaign and implementation plan, including a marketing toolkit built so a two-person team can actually run it after we are gone.