We all have a little voice inside us. A tiny Mini-Me in our hippocampus reminding us that we can do great things. For the California Community Colleges, we brought that little voice to the forefront through two simple, yet powerful words: I CAN. This empowering phrase serves as a reminder to students – past, present and future – that they have it within themselves to create better futures, follow a passion and realize their full potential.

With 115 colleges across the state, The California Community Colleges wanted to create awareness about financial aid available to a wide range of students through icanaffordcollege.com. Our strategy was to reach out to teens, youth, re-entry students and influencers through a multi-platformed approach incorporating broadcast, posters, social media and video.

We partnered with social media star Zach King and his production team in Los Angeles. Along with Zach we engaged his audience of 3.7 million Instagram followers, 2.3 million Facebook fans, and 94k Twitter followers to spread the message across the internet. With Zach we produced a web video that at last count had over 3.5 million views and helped spread the word about I Can Afford College across the state.

To encourage and educate Latino audiences to financial aid opportunities we created a series of Telenovelas that dispelled myths and misinformation and provided information on how to apply for financial aid. These Spanish Telenovellas focused on the parents and caregivers concerns such as expense, location, investment and how education can provide their children a better life. After the Telenovellas aired the Spanish website received a %165 increase in views with more than 500,000 views of the videos.