Strategies for Promoting Trade Adjustment Assistance in Colorado

I have worked with the Trade Program at the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) for many years and am often asked what makes the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program (TAA) so challenging. The answer is outreach. TAA is the best kept secret in the workforce world. Neither workers nor employers have heard of TAA or know about the amazing benefits it offers. For the last year or so, I have been working with my team to implement a variety of outreach tactics. While it's too early to tell how some are performing, here are the things we are trying: 

• Hiring staff: We hired a part-time grant assistant to call or email the workers on our worker lists to talk to them about TAA and answer any questions they have. He is starting with the most current lists and working his way back to the older lists. After he connected with a couple of people who expressed interest in the program, he referred them to their local TAA counselor and notified the counselor to reach out to the worker to improve the odds of enrollment.

• Social media: Our public relations team posts TAA certified petition notifications, as well as, posts about the TAA program as a whole on the CDLE Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts on a regular basis.

• Unemployment Insurance (UI) Community: We placed an article about the TAA program in the UI employer newsletter. As a result, a potentially adversely affected worker reached out and we filed a new petition on the worker groups behalf. We also include TAA information in weekly emails to UI claimants.

• Industry and Human Resource (HR) Newsletters: In February, we published an article in the Colorado Manufacturing Report, an industry focused newsletter. We are in the process of submitting an article for the newsletter for the Society for Human Resource Management.

• Eligible workers: In the next few months, we are excited to begin a campaign to send postcards to eligible workers to inquire about why they haven’t applied for the program. We hope insight gained from this outreach will help us better determine which outreach tactics will be most effective moving forward.

Our overall goal is to reach as many workers and employers as possible to spread the word about the TAA program in Colorado. We eagerly await positive outcomes to share while we explore various methods of outreach.

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Posted by: Rachel Floyd-Nelson
• Posted in: Trade Adjustment Assistance for Workers