You Know He Can Fly

We were recently approached by a company out of Georgia, Career Training Concepts (CTC), to help them create awareness in the marketplace for a terrific assessment tool for middle school students. This tool is called FutureFocus and is one of the best I have seen for helping kids discover how they are wired and to offer suggestions on potential career and educational paths. CTC has a big idea: to find one corporate sponsor to help them so that they can offer this assessment for free to every middle school student in America.

Marketing for this sizable undertaking would have to be two-pronged. One, we would need to create awareness in the schools among counselors, leadership, superintendents, and teachers. Second, we would have to begin to make inroads into the corporate "huts" so that we could find a potential donor. We felt that a donor would receive a lot of ancillary benefits from making this contribution. Along with giving a leg up to the next generation of potential leaders, they would endear themselves and their brand to parents across the land who would be thrilled to know that company X generously gave to help their kids be better prepared for the future.

We have just begun this project and have placed two full-page ads in the American School Counselor Magazine (see left). We did a small focus group with counselors and administrators and were told that the message and images of these ads would resonate with counselors everywhere, most of whom have chosen that profession because they want to make a difference in the world and see changed and fulfilled lives for their students. We are proud of what we have done so far, and hope to find a sponsor soon.