School Budget, how we helped spread the message.
DÜ GOOD is not just a name for us, it is part of our driving force. This year we decided to focus our efforts on helping the Cornwall Central School District’s Board of Education spread their message on the upcoming school budget.
Because of all the uncertainty created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the district has had to come up with a plan addressing possible cuts to the state funding that it relies on from year to year. Not only that, but all the meetings used to communicate with the public about the school budget have shifted online making it difficult for many members of the community to find out information on the school budget.
DGS (DÜ GOOD Studio) teamed up with the Board of Education to create a series of videos highlighting some key information about the budget. We shared them across the multiple Facebook pages operated by the school district.
“But what about social distancing?” you may ask.
Good question. Instead of doing a traditional video production session requiring the school board members to come to the studio and record their respective videos, we decided to embrace the new normal and simply have each member record a video from home addressing the public’s main questions.
The important thing after all is the message!
We created an opening and closing graphic, lower thirds (people’s names), mixed the audio, did minor color correction and created thumbnails illustrating what each video was about in order to grab people’s attention creating greater engagement.
The campaign has been extremely successful and garnered thousands of views through multiple channels and allowed the public to make an informed decision when voting for the school budget.
More than 3500 people in the community submitted their vote and the budget passed with 60% of the vote - a 5% improvement over the previous year’s margin.
School board member Brendan Carty credited the videos for helping educate the voters and said the board plans on using a similar communication strategy in the years ahead.
