Communities In Schools

Every 26 seconds a young person in America drops out of school. That is, unless they get involved with Communities In Schools (CIS), a national organization that helps kids graduate by providing them with food, clothing, medical care, and other services that kids need in order to stay engaged.

Ripple recently partnered with CIS and COMMON.is, a do-good advertising agency, to raise the profile of this organization in three cities – Charleston, South Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; and San Antonio, Texas. The goal was to use these three sites as test markets for a national advertising campaign. Short, emotional videos of real kids affected by CIS were made by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, and photos by renowned photographer David Harriman, ran on cable stations, bus shelters, movie theaters and in local papers.

Knowing that an ad campaign alone was not enough to generate traditional media attention, Ripple conceptualized, wrote and released reports on how many students in each of these cities were benefiting from their involvement with CIS, featuring updated data and interviews with students, teachers and administrators. After months of preparation and relentless pitching, these reports and the advertising campaign were featured in the cities’ major papers and on most of the local TV news and radio stations. We also coordinated with the campaign’s social media team to circulate the stories more broadly. This is just one of our latest case studies that demonstrates the importance of generating original content, and then circulating it for maximum impact.