Client: Bezos Family Foundation
Our team was tasked with creating a communications and awareness campaign to encourage low-income parents and guardians in the United States to engage more with their children between the ages of 0 - 5. The first month of our work was strictly research, conducting dozens of expert interviews, and traveling to San Leandro and Bakersfield, CA, Bronx, NY, and Harrisburg, PA. We gleaned some powerful insights about just how much sweat and heartbreak it takes to raise children in poverty in this country.
Our final brand concept was highly positive, assuring parents that everything they do with their child helps to build their brain. The point was to turn conventional black-and-white messaging around parenting on its head, to encourage parents to find small moments in their everyday routines to engage with their children, rather than feeling like they needed to devote huge amounts of uninterrupted time at home reading to their children. From our research, messaging that included this kind of unattainable goal were non-starters--parents simply tuned them out.
The campaign was meant to reframe what “counted” as good parenting, and who could be a good parent. Engaged parenting was not reserved for white middle-class parents, and it did not need to involve reading, when many of the parents we talked to could not read well themselves.
Credit: IDEO.org