Ad Council and US Army come together for "Boost"

Background: A 2005 study conducted by the Urban Institute reported that every 29 seconds, another student gives up on school, resulting in 1 million students dropping out every year.

To respond to this problem, the Ad Council teamed up with the US Army to “give teens a ‘boost’ to stay in school in December of 2007.

The “Boost” campaign, an extension of the high school dropout prevention initiative launched in 2000, incorporates several communication vehicles to get the message out teens across the nation: PSA commercials , email communication, text messaging, user-generated content on YouTube and social networking sites Facebook and MySpace. All of these components connect to the campaign’s website www.boostup.org. Over 15,000 boosts have been sent to date.

Diagnosis: They get it! The Ad Council really gets it! Here’s a nice interactive campaign which allows people to send boosts to high school students who need a little encouragement to make it to graduation. The boosts get to students where they already spend time online and can also be sent via text and email. By going about it this way, engagement is not an issue because you are interacting with the target audience in their own space, and to help out the public sending the messages, there are several pre-made messages for people to choose from.

Prescription: Make the Boost campaign bigger.

I’d really like to see more students and their stories featured on the site. While there is an option to send a boost to someone you know, it would be great if you could sign someone up to receive boosts from everyone.

I’m sure that there we’ve all encountered a couple kids who could use a little non-traditional encouragement to keep them going, and one way to make that happen is to create the space for people to post the stories of students they know who need the help. Site visitors would be able to send these students boosts, and hopefully when the boosts really started to come in, they’d know that finishing school was worth it and that people care.