Outreach Playbook

This document is the reasoning and process behind the consulting arm’s acquisition channel — the why and how of outreach. For the what’s actually been done so far, see the live, contact-by-contact execution artifact at consulting/operations/network-activation-tracker.md. Keeping these separate matters: the tracker is meant to be filled in and updated constantly as real outreach happens, while this playbook is meant to stay stable as the settled reasoning behind that work, referred back to whenever a specific outreach decision needs a second opinion.

flowchart LR
    A["Warm network<br/>(20 named contacts)"] -->|ask for a venue,<br/>not a referral| B["Free community talk<br/>(60-90 min)"]
    B -->|sign-up sheet,<br/>dates already set| C["Paid cohort<br/>(8 families x $150)"]
    B -.produces referrals<br/>as a side effect.-> A

Why a single channel, not several

The acquisition strategy for year one is deliberately narrow: warm network → free community talk → paid cohort, one channel, run properly, rather than several channels each run thinly. This isn’t caution for its own sake — it’s a direct consequence of the 6–10 hour/week capacity constraint that governs the entire business (company/strategy/roadmap.md §1). A founder trying to simultaneously run a warm-network campaign, a paid ad experiment, an SEO content push, and a cold-outreach email sequence, all inside ten hours a week including the actual delivery work, ends up doing all four badly rather than one thing well. Worse, several of those channels (paid advertising, SEO, content calendars) don’t even match how this specific buyer — a parent making a trust-based, community-mediated decision about their child’s academic future — actually shops for this kind of help, per company/strategy/business-plan.md §5.5’s explicit list of what’s out of scope for year one. A warm introduction from someone the parent already trusts is a fundamentally different kind of credibility than an ad they scrolled past, and it’s also the cheapest channel available to the practice, since the network already exists and simply hasn’t been activated yet.

The core tactic: ask for a venue, not a referral

The single most important tactical decision in this playbook, already embedded in the tracker’s message template, is what the outreach message actually asks for. It does not ask “do you know anyone who needs this?” or “can you send me clients?” — both of which put the contact in the position of vouching for the founder’s competence to someone else, a much bigger ask than it sounds like. Instead, it asks: “I’m running a free session for parents about what Canadian universities expect. Do you know a room where that would be useful?”

This works because asking for a venue is a categorically easier yes than asking for a referral. The contact isn’t being asked to personally vouch for anything — they’re being asked whether they know of a room, which is a much lower-stakes, more concrete, more answerable question. And critically, it produces referrals anyway, as a side effect: once someone identifies a venue — a community centre, a place of worship, a settlement agency’s programming space — that conversation naturally surfaces the people who run programming there, who are themselves potential venue contacts or, just as often, parents who’d want to attend. The venue ask is a Trojan horse for the referral ask, without ever having to make the referral ask directly.

Operating rules

Two rules from the tracker’s own instructions are worth restating here as settled policy, not just tracker etiquette: no batch-sending, and every message has to sound like the founder, referencing how she actually knows that specific contact. Both rules exist for the same reason — a warm-network channel’s entire value comes from the fact that it’s not a broadcast. A message that reads as a template, or that gets sent identically to twenty people, destroys the exact thing that makes this channel work better than a cold one: personal, specific trust. The tracker enforces this at the point of execution (one row per person, notes on how each one is actually known), and this playbook is the reminder of why that discipline matters even when it would be faster to just send the same message to everyone on the list.

What “success” looks like at each step, and what changes it

The two-step funnel — network activation, then the talk itself — has its own success and kill criteria, defined in full in company/strategy/roadmap.md §5: if twenty individually-contacted warm contacts produce zero venue conversations, that’s a signal the network is colder than assumed, and the response is to pivot toward direct outreach to settlement agencies and library programming staff, who book community sessions as a normal part of their job rather than as a favour. If a talk runs but produces fewer than roughly four sign-ups across two deliveries, that’s a signal about the offer or the room, not about outreach effort, and the response is to interview non-converters before running a third talk on the same format. Neither of these is a reason to simply try harder at the same tactic — they’re built-in checkpoints for when this playbook itself needs to change, not just be executed more energetically.