Re-Branding and Re-Wording for Optimal Future Sustainability

Yo Guys,

I followed AIDA from marketing to focus ALMas' content and and lay down the foundation's of ALMas' marketing and fundraising strategy.  It all focuses on making our program stand out using the time-tested and empirically tested strategies of story-telling and adapting the message to fit the reader/listener.

I got this from reading a book called, How to Write Fundraising Materials That Raise More Money by Tom Ahern.  It's a GOD-SEND.

It really focuses on how to make materials for your organization that clearly explain its importance.

I'm trying to implement that right now, and it has also been a great way to pull my organization members together and hash out elevator pitches, program descriptions, and get everyone in-line with the organization's mission and purpose.

So here's my AIDA for ALMas:

Attention

The Hispanic community and its children in the United States are in danger.

Interest

Compared to all other ethnicities in the US, hispanic students have the highest high school dropout rates, and they academically underperform compared to white students at every grade K-12.  Consequently, as adults these children can expect to be unemployed, earn low-incomes, and struggle as they straddle the lines between life and poverty.

Desire

These students’ gaps in academics and their struggles in economics are the result of their cognitive and noncognitive skill deficits that opened up early in their childhoods and continued to grow larger into adulthood.  Early in life, these children are read to less than optimally; they are exposed to less vibrant, expansive language and vocabularies; and they are less frequently enrolled into high quality preschool programs.  Their mothers, who largely raise them, know they should invest in developing their children’s skills--but they don’t know how.

As immigration trends remain constant for the foreseeable future, where largely  disadvantaged and uneducated Hispanic mothers and families immigrate from Mexico and Central America to raise their children in the US, these children will continue to drop-out of school at the nation’s highest rates; they will continue to academically under-perform their white peers;  and they will continue to struggle economically in the labor market.  

Action

But there is a solution.

If we intervene in these children’s lives early (ages 0 - 5) through high quality early childhood literacy programs  and programs geared towards working with these children’s parents, we can raise their high school completion rates, raise their employment rates, decrease their poverty rates, and raise their incomes!

ALMas: Pre-K Literacy and Mentorships is doing just that.  We’ve implemented an after school pre-k literacy program based upon the most recent research in early childhood education, and through that same program we work with parents to teach them how to help their children continue learning; growing at home; becoming productive citizens in a new advanced, technical economy.