Anticipating the needs of an audience
A national non-profit sought to create a sophisticated campaign to engage a focused set of audiences.
Client: Playworks
Role: UX Lead
Deliverables: Internal and external user interviews and surveys, research and analysis, content strategy, personas, information architecture, initial wireframes, prototype
Project Time Frame: January through June, 2017
Above: Early campaign concept collateral features engaged, enthusiastic kids playing together.
Background
Playworks’ vision is for every child in the United States to have access to safe and healthy play everyday. Founded on the principles that play and games can encourage key social and emotional development, Playworks offers services to public, private, and charter elementary schools across the U.S. and strives to improve access to play both in the classroom and at recess. In an effort to expand their impact, they sought to galvanize not only their community of educators to both track their school’s progress and refer other school to improve their play programming, but also to determine any additional audiences that could help increase the impact of a broad movement to improve access to quality play programming in schools.
solution
A focused research phase revealed that the key audiences to focus on in order to increase access to high quality play programs were educators—specifically principals as well as the teachers and staff that they regularly interact with. Delving into established and emerging markets for Playworks services, key markets were identified in which to deploy a highly targeted campaign to reach this group with relevant content. The touchpoints within the campaign would include all established channels (both digital and offline) as well as new channels specific to the campaign. Throughout the course of this project, we researched key audiences, respective desired actions, and required content and channels for each. Research indicated that not only would these audiences be key in creating a larger movement for better play in schools, but the needs of those at higher performing schools (in terms of standardized test scores) were somewhat different than those at lower performing schools.
Below I've included personas and strategy artifacts that depict who the campaign is targeted towards and how to reach them based on the needs we uncovered in our strategy phase.
Above: Additional campaign collateral for the early design phase of the project.
next steps
The strategy provided the overall direction for the campaign execution and website design, which is well underway. The live campaign website can be seen here.