A state agency responsible for providing services to the Latino population had been using a "blitz" approach of radio, TV, and theatre slides to inform their target audience about the legal requirements of working within the state, and to publicize their support hotline. The agency wanted to make sure that their marketing investment was translating into calls to their hotline and also increased compliance with labor and tax laws, but they had no idea how to measure whether the advertising was affecting the behaviors of their target audience.

Beginning by analyzing marketing campaigns and data collection that had already been set up, SMI designed a sequence of two studies, across ten regions of the state, to correlate the advertising spend to the desired behaviors in the target audience. While there were several interesting findings from the study about the specific marketing campaign (mostly highlighting the lack of effectiveness of the campaign), the most important discovery for the agency was that setting up an ongoing approach to measuring their outreach effectiveness was critical to their future success, and identifying several key issues they needed to address to make that possible. For example, while they had been tracking number of calls to their hotlines, they had previously not asked any callers how they had learned of the hotline - a simple and very telling set of data to collect. Additionally, they had not been tracking compliance regionally, but only state-wide, so they had no way to correlate the marketing campaigns in specific regions to resultant behaviors. Most importantly, they learned that they would save and more intelligently apply a great portion of their budget by piloting outreach projects to assess their effectiveness in a controlled study before "blitzing" the entire state with an unproven methodology. SMI has been contracted to help them learn and internalize the skills and processes needed to conduct their own ongoing measurement and evaluation.