American Graduate

On this client and for this project we served as creative partner for the contracting agency, Widmeyer Communications. 

background:

In an effort to help improve high school dropout rates in public media markets and around the country, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) established the American Graduate program. The program funds and promotes stay-in-school initiatives run by local public media stations. Help was needed to brand and launch the initiative so CPB reached out to PR firm Widmeyer Communications. They, in turn asked us for assistance.

challenge:

The brand needed to be able to appeal to a variety of markets and support a variety of messages – from materials that local public media stations could use to promote participation in their programs (PSA campaign materials)… to fact sheets and info graphics that could be distributed to the media… to an internal audience of diverse needs. 

To top it all off, when Widmeyer and Fixation were awarded the project, a launch event date and location had already been established – and it was just 8 weeks away… all that had to be done was create a brand, plan an event, find speakers and launch.

obsession:

The timeframe helped determine a lot. Fortunately there was a solid strategy, compliments of Widmeyer. There was also a unique component to this cause-related campaign: unlike other campaigns, where driving people to a website to become a part of the social network is the only action one could take, this campaign included very community-specific actions that could be taken. 

By obsessing on this unique aspect, along with the educational nature of the name, we were able to develop a logo, tagline and graphics package that did a lot of  heavy lifting on its own. And since it was developed in a simple executional format, digital conversion, printing and materials development was easy… making the super-tight deadlines less stress-filled for all our clients.

Campaign elements included logo, tagline, brand identity elements, event signage, infographics, postcard, psa print ads, Facebook & video graphics.

results:

A  successful brand and launch event at the NEWSEUM with celebrity & media appearances by America Ferrera, Aimee Garcia, Jenna Bush Hager, Dule Hill and Wilmer Valderrama.  And instead of a website, a Facebook page was created to support the launch and foster a sense of community. Thousands of likes and posts later, the American Graduate brand and cause is going strong. (check it out at facebook.com/americangraduate)