Two PSAs, Two Distinct Audiences, One Collaborative Team
Tags: Family, Public Relations, Communication, Homeless, Youth

By Aarti Chandorkar, Rodrigo Gouveia, Amber Hubert, Kasey Iranon, Hillary Moglen, and Kevin Singer

As schools across the country returned to either virtual or in-person learning this fall, RALLY partnered with SchoolHouse Connection (“SHC”) — a national non-profit organization working to overcome homelessness through education — to produce two video PSAs aimed at connecting children, youth, and families experiencing homelessness with information and resources through school.

Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, public schools identified a record 1.5 million children and youth living without a permanent home. These numbers have skyrocketed since, and school facility closures make it even harder for students experiencing homelessness to access basic needs like food, shelter, Wifi and technology for schoolwork, and social-emotional support. This is especially alarming, since not completing high school is the greatest single risk factor for homelessness as a young person — making education a critical intervention for breaking generational cycles of homelessness.

SHC had two distinct audiences to reach with specific messaging. First, the PSA titled Do You See? seeks to educate community members and civic organizations of the federal right to an education and enlist their help to connect children and families experiencing homelessness to support. The second PSA titled Dez Says is aimed at youth (those living on their own or with family) and is narrated by Dez, a youth with lived experience — emphasizing the importance of advocating for their education, despite the challenges and barriers.

Both PSAs are recognizably different, but what do they have in common? A strong collaboration with our strategic communicators, digital team, design specialists, and the expertise of our client, SchoolHouse Connection. It is this unique blend of disciplines that resulted in two impactful end products uniquely effective for their respective audiences.

What did we learn?

Effective Execution Starts with Sound Strategy

For nuanced, issue-specific content, it’s crucial that everything from the language and substance of the piece, to the style and production elements, to the distribution mechanism, is informed by the same strategy. SchoolHouse Connection wants these PSAs to reach children, youth, and families experiencing homelessness (or those in contact with them) — a challenge made tougher given the hidden, mobile, and vulnerable natures of these populations.

For both PSAs, a sound, informed strategy guided our many execution decisions and led to content that resonates with our target audiences. With SchoolHouse Connection’s guidance, we tackled critical questions — what are the barriers our target audiences face to accessing information and help? In terms of distribution, where are our audiences accessing information and how do we reach them there? With budgetary constraints, do we allocate more resources to production or distribution? And for our creative content, how do we get users to stop scrolling and watch? How do we prioritize getting across key pieces of information for users who don’t finish the video?

These discussions led to strategic alignment and laid the foundation for the messaging, creative, and distribution decisions.

This Work Doesn’t Happen In A Silo

Even with strategic alignment, execution decision points cannot be made in a vacuum. Impactful content depends on the synergy of messaging, production and distribution, so it is crucial that team members — from our communications staffers, to paid media experts, to the designer(s) — are in the same “room.” When the work is siloed — and when these questions are considered separately — the resulting content can feel disjointed or muddled and ultimately fail to capture our audiences’ attention.

For example, Do You See’s animated visuals, broad community-focused messaging, and outreach strategy were the result of combined input from SHC and expertise from different RALLY team members. Through our group discussions, we came to the conclusion that children and families experiencing homelessness often lack community support, so our PSA focused on reaching organizations, professionals, and community members who might be in close touch with them and enlisting their help.

This approach led us to pursue a positive and whimsical tone via animation, knowing that visual elements are complementary and fundamental to making sure the message resonates. Our design team recommended using a soft palette of pastel colors, derived from the campaign’s brand, in conjunction with light illustrations, in order to balance the heavy tone of the messaging and focus on children and families. It helped shape the communication team’s recommendation to keep the messaging and calls-to-action succinct and accessible to a broad set of viewers.

Finally, it informed our digital strategy to boost the PSA through paid social outreach, allowing us to reach key groups as widely as possible. This, in turn, informed our creative strategy, including the strong hook, “Do you see the child experiencing homelessness?” aimed at inspiring curiosity and stopping users from scrolling past the video.

At each step in the process, decisions that were made in one ‘bucket’ would impact and inform our decisions in others. This ensured alignment throughout the entire process, and resulted in extraordinarily good results for our paid ads on Facebook. A full 1/3rd of people who saw our ads finished the entire 85-second video.

Meet Your Audiences Where They Are

Keeping in mind the broad community focus of Do You See, our outreach plan was designed to reach as wide an audience as possible within certain key groups. To do this in a cost-effective way, we ran a highly-targeted paid Facebook ad campaign to 240,000 teachers and education-related professionals likely in contact with children and families — specifically located in “low-organic reach” states, or states that could benefit from the most paid promotion in lieu of strong organic outreach infrastructure. We supplemented this with organic social toolkits, e-blasts to SHC’s partners and on-the-ground networks, and earned media outreach to make sure we were reaching as wide as possible.

When seeking help to overcome homelessness, youth face barriers such as unfair stigmas and fears about being put in the foster care system. That’s why we went with live-action production, narrated by Dez — someone whose voice could authentically speak to this issue, reassure her peers that they are not alone, and encourage them to advocate for themselves. Youth also tend to communicate closely with their schools, and less on social media channels like Facebook where we might put out ads. For that reason, we focused on an organic approach — i.e. having SchoolHouse Connection and its partners (education organizations, school districts, and more) organically distribute the PSA via their networks, e-blasts, and social channels that youth might regularly check.

Both PSAs — fully produced in-house at RALLY — and a third PSA featuring Sesame Street’s Elmo — can be found here, as well as other resources and support for youth experiencing homelessness.