CASE STUDY
Ready For Pre-K
The Opportunity
The path to future success starts with a high-quality early childhood education. Universal pre-K is free to every 3- and 4-year-old in Washington, DC. Ensuring that every family in the District has the support they need to access this essential service is Ready for Pre-K!’s mission.
Ready for Pre-K! is a DC Public Schools initiative to help families with toddlers prepare for and enroll in universal pre-K. What started as a pilot program soon expanded into a fully funded initiative, which needed branding that conveyed its mission and values.
DC is home to families from around the world; this diversity is one of the District’s greatest strengths. Ready for Pre-K!’s brand needed to capture the joyfulness of early childhood education while speaking to thousands of families from a variety of cultures, languages, and backgrounds.
CATEGORIES OF WORK
Advertising
Branding
Communications strategy
Community engagement
Content creation
Creative design
Digital marketing
Messaging
Video production
Web design + development
The Solution
To appeal to children and caregivers alike, Buoy got to work creating a brand identity that conveyed the cheerful personality of the initiative.
We focused on hand-drawn elements, bright pops of color, and a lively refresh of existing assets to create a unique, eye-catching brand that showcased Ready for Pre-K!’s playful and inviting spirit.
We created a foundational website and a set of promotional postcards and posters for sharing at events throughout the District.
Buoy also partnered to create a comprehensive enrollment campaign, producing content and designs for television and radio commercials, digital ads, bus ads, door-to-door canvassing materials, and social media posts.
And we used Ready for Pre-K!’s mascot – a puppet named Scribbles – as a central part of the communications and outreach strategy, in videos, event appearances, local newscasts, stickers, and other collateral. The safe, warm feeling of the whimsical videos helped to instill a sense of trust in the pre-K experience for families new to the public school system.
To ensure accessibility, all materials were produced in English, Spanish, and Amharhic, the most-spoken languages of families with young children in DC.
The Impact
In the year after Ready for Pre-K!'s relaunch, enrollment in pre-K at DC Public Schools increased by 7%. The organization hosted 15 virtual sessions for families, which were viewed over 3,500 times. Due to the popularity of its visual identity, the Ready for Pre-K! branding has been expanded to encompass all DC Public Schools Early Childhood Division activities and programs.
“The Buoy team immediately felt like a true partner. They helped us take Ready for Pre-K! from a budding initiative to a central part of the DC Public Schools portfolio. They brought our ideas to life in a kind, collaborative way, and the new brand perfectly captured the joyful, welcoming environment we hoped to convey. Not only were they incredibly patient — and genuinely fun to work with — but they elevated all of our ideas, too. Anything we shared, Buoy showed us ways to make it better and more polished. Everything was given so much care!”
— Drue Docie, Manager, Birth to Five Programming in the Early Childhood Education Division, District of Columbia Public Schools