( 00-01 )
The Challenge
TOOLKT had a programme, a mission, and two founders with the experience to deliver both.
The guys at TOOLKT were on a mission. They wanted to teach boys aged 11-14 essential life skills that schools don't teach.
The plan was simple. Twelve boys per cohort. In person, weekly for ten weeks, learning the eight Essential Skills that dramatically improve the chances of success at high school and beyond. The programme was designed. The pilot worked. The only untested part was the one that funds everything else: would parents pay for it?
The plan for enquiries was a 30 to 45 minute online intro session. It did the job, but a founder had to run every single one. Fine for one suburb. Not fine for an organisation that intends to change the odds for boys across the world.
There was no email list. No marketing. No data on what parents were actually worried about.
So the brief was bigger than a campaign. Build something that sells this cohort, then build it so the next city doesn't start from scratch.
( 00-02 )
The Strategy
The objective of the pilot wasn't just to sell out. It was to find out which parts of the model travel, and which have to be rebuilt every time a new city opened.
So we didn't run the Wellington launch as a campaign. Through Meta, we tested a launch model. Two lead magnets were purposely set against each other. Different video formats were tested. One open question was included on every native lead form, so parents helped us shape the campaign by sharing what they cared about instead of us guessing.
Built the funnel in two phases, not one.
Social media campaign built over two phases:
Phase one a 3-week lead generation campaign, carried by two magnets: a downloadable guide for parents, and a quiz that showed them where their son's skills sat and where the gaps were.
Phase two was a 2-week conversion campaign run against that warm audience. Nobody was asked to commit to a ten week programme straight off a cold ad, but some did.
Used native lead forms to collect data, not just names.
Every form asked parents where their son needed support, and their age. Those answers set the message for this campaign, and they still set it for the ones running now.
Replaced the info session with guides and automated nurture.
A sequence sat behind each magnet, so a parent could go deeper on the why, the what, and the how in their own time, then get a nudge to enrol in a cohort before the conversion campaign opened. A truly scalable nurture system without a founder answering every enquiry personally.
Ran deliberate tests, not variations.
Low-friction e-book against higher-commitment quiz, to measure lead quality rather than lead cost. Long copy against short. Founder-led content vs coach-led content. Statics against video. Every test was built to deliver learnings we'd carry into the next city.
Tested content angles with the same discipline.
Problem aware. Parent pain point. Intervention. Reassurance. Outcome-led. Invitation. Overwhelm. Relatability. Social proof. Controversy. Urgency. 11+ angles in the market, so data told us which ones move parents, rather than which ones we liked.
Shot founder and coach video natively.
No production gloss. Scripts with hooks that named a frustration parents already recognised in their own boys, in the words they'd use themselves. Built for the feed, not for a brand deck.
We sat down with the founders every week to share what the numbers were saying and adapt the plan. A test is only worth running if you can act on it before the campaign ends. What we learned on Monday changed the ads by Wednesday.
"SEA care. They listen. They respond. They push back when they should. We're way better with them on the team.”
TONY BALFOUR - TOOLKT CO-FOUNDER
75%
more enrolments than the pilot target
3 Cities
Replicated into Christchurch and Auckland
( 00-03 )
The Results
A repeatable system ready for rollout nationwide
One Wellington suburb. Twelve spots. All filled. The first cohort sold out, and a second opened mid-pilot campaign to take the overflow. The useful part is what happened next: the same model has since run and sold out cohorts in Christchurch, Auckland and back into Wellington, carrying the same message architecture and the same two-phase funnel, rebuilt only where the numbers showed a leak.
Parents weren't searching for this. They didn't know it existed. So TOOLKT had to build its own demand. In the pilot, the 8 Essential Skills were named in creative that reached more than 68,000 accounts and landed directly with over 350 parents through the e-book and the quiz. The rollout into two more cities has since put it in front of another 167,441. More than 1,000 parents have now moved through nurture sequences that inform them about the programme and answer all their questions without any founder involvement. To date, TOOKT has equipped over 50 boys, and they are just getting started.
