Bullying Prevention
Client
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Center for Mental
Health Services (CMHS) sponsors a nationwide campaign to prevent
bullying, reaching out to inform educators, parents, and community
members—as well as youth themselves—about ways to identify and curb
bullying behaviors among children and teens.
Challenge
By 2004, HHS had compiled a wealth of bullying prevention resources,
but these tools, reports, studies, and policies were scattered
throughout two agencies in offices that focused on their own particular
audiences. The department needed a mechanism for these offices to share
resources and provide a centralized point of contact for stakeholder
groups to obtain information.
Enter Reingold
Reingold set out to resolve multiple issues: consolidating bullying
information and distilling it down to its essential components;
organizing the material so that distinct audiences—such as parents and
children—could access the information they need; and branding and
raising awareness about the bullying prevention work of HHS. We sifted
through all of HHS' bullying material and organized it in a
three-dimensional wireframe for a CD-ROM, built from the customer's
eye-view. Reingold focused not on the information HHS had to share, but
rather on the information each audience needed to find. Then we created
memorable designs for both the CD-ROM content and its packaging, which
branded the agency and its program. In 2008, Reingold resumed our
bullying prevention work, distilling, designing, and developing a set
of resources for principals derived from the TeachSafeSchools.org
website and stakeholder input. We created a four-color box filled with
posters, CDs, videos on DVD, brochures, tip sheets, and a program
overview—all to be made available online in a downloadable format as
well.
Results
Working
with HHS, Reingold identified dozens of
organizations with a direct interest in putting a stop to bullying,
each with its own network of members and stakeholders who would benefit
from the CD-ROM. Through our outreach, we delivered more than 40,000
of the resource cards to school districts, parent organizations,
educational
associations, and other youth-serving organizations. And today our
user-friendly tools are helping school principals educate and enlist
the support of teachers, parents, students, and community members in
stopping bullying before it starts.