Because the education and literacy level of the audience varied significantly, the campaign message was kept simple—to build community resilience. To reduce copy and encourage better understanding across cultural divides, images were developed through illustration and animation to depict protective factors and the outcome of reversing ACEs in children. To overcome misconceptions that race or income alone are factors for ACEs, the characters were developed in a variety of colors not associated with any race or group—colors that simply illustrated people, such as blue, purple, green, orange. Also, because the characters were developed in random colors, the campaign message was easily translated between English and Spanish, saving costs and allowing more of the budget to be allocated to the actual media placements.
A dual language, English and Spanish, web landing page served as the nucleus of the campaign. Media messages directed the audience to the landing page for education, resources, and an invitation to take action. While several organizations across the country have released studies and documentation about ACEs, protective factors, and resilience, we felt it was important to have one repository of information to pull those resources together, as well as a means to provide information about resources available within our local communities.
The landing page also provided a tool for measuring the success of the campaign. Site analytics tracked the number of visitors to the site, language preference, time spent on pages, video views, and links selected.