Challenge

The New York City Department of Education is the nation’s largest school district, serving 1.1 million students in 1,800 schools. Over the past three years the DOE asked Cause to create advertising and communication tools for large public campaigns to reach new and returning students and families with targeted messages in multiple languages.

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Solution

Working with the DOE team, we designed robust suites of advertising and communications tools for three campaigns — the free Summer Rising learning program, a Back to School campaign, and an effort to engage families as the city reopened schools as the COVID-19 pandemic eased.

 

In each case, we created and delivered playful, action-oriented campaign assets that adhered to the DOE’s strict brand style guide, including:

• Print and digital ads translated into 12 languages

• Posters for stores, bus shelters, buses, subway stations and more

• Social media posts for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

 

Knowing the ads would be translated into a dozen languages, we kept copy points simple and ensured layouts included extra space to accommodate translations requiring longer phrasing, such as Spanish, or unique characters, such as Arabic, Korean and Hindi.

 

The campaigns reached hundreds of thousands of students and parents in targeted neighborhoods through community newspapers, social media, and outdoor placements.