ESDM Training are at the forefront of early intervention education and support. The founders have built a significant personal profile and are leaders in the field, yet their website and promotion of the courses were facing significant hurdles and there was a need to make enrolment easier.
Improving Enrolment Rates for ESDM Training
The Brief
We need marketing support, but our existing website and brand were heavily restricted by a university-governed training course. Our other valuable courses were difficult to find and book, due to a hidden presence and a cumbersome manual booking, paperwork, and invoicing system. This limited our promotional freedom, obscured our other offerings, and created significant enrollment barriers.
Let’s start with the name – we want something that champions the cause and appeals to the parents, healthcare workers and beyond that operate in this space. Once have a new visual brand we can look to develop a new online presence to increase your enrolments.
The Solution
The Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) is an evidence-based, play-based intervention approach designed for young children with autism, typically aged 12 to 48 months. Rooted in both developmental psychology and applied behaviour analysis (ABA), ESDM emphasises relationship building, shared engagement, and naturalistic teaching to support language, cognitive, social, and motor development.
ESDM is well-known in specialist autism and early childhood circles but largely unknown to the general public. It’s a niche, clinical intervention not commonly featured in mainstream media or public discussion, so unless you’re working in the field, you’re unlikely to come across it.
Recognising these limitations, Storytellers Australia devised a comprehensive strategy to create a new, distinct brand: “Allies for Autism.” This name was chosen to resonate with Allied Health professionals, educators, and parents working with early years autism.
Our plan involved:
- Brand Development: Creating “Allies for Autism” for greater promotional freedom.
- Digital Presence Enhancement: Building a new, intuitive website with strategic SEO and an integrated online booking and payment system for self-registration.
- Offline Promotion & Outreach: Producing and distributing pamphlets to preschools, daycares, and allied health centers to drive traffic to the new site.
Brand Development
The renaming of ESDM Training to Allies for Autism triggered a branding exercise that led us to some interesting concepts. We had a key realisation early on in our research when we realised that autism is expressed so differently by different people. Each autistic individual was completely unique in their experience which allowed us to come to a realisation – what if the brand we created would be unique every time it was used?
Fancy a deeper dive into our thinking on this brand? Read our Insight post Designing 23 trillion logos.
Digital Presence Enhancement
The old ESDM website didn’t have a clear direction to direct users, with a complex menu and a ton of information that served to distract rather than inform.
We were keen to keep a clear, purposeful layout restricted to one page, introducing users who were unfamiliar with the ESDM term to the types of training that Allies for Autism offer. It was important to clarify the offering to parents of autistic children especially.
Offline Promotion & Outreach
In conclusion, by strategically separating the brand, optimising the digital presence with an integrated booking system, and executing targeted offline outreach, Storytellers Australia successfully empowered EDSM Training to overcome its marketing challenges, expand its reach, and streamline its operations under the new “Allies for Autism” banner.