Many Problems, One Source.

The creation of marketing materials is a challenging task. For the last eighteen months, I have spent almost everyday trying to learn more about adolescent literacy and develop an improved intervention. Frankly, I now know a lot about literacy development. The challenge in creating marketing materials is that all of the knowledge gathered over those eighteen months must be condensed into short, but powerful, statements. It is a task that I find supremely challenging.

In working on a concise "problem statement" with one of my board members, I found myself talking about the various factors influenced by a teenager's reading ability. Did you know:

• Those students who enter high school in the bottom quartile in reading are twenty times more likely to drop out of school than their higher performing peers.
• Advanced literacy across content areas is the best available predictor of students' ability to succeed in introductory college courses.
• About 40% of high school graduates lack the literacy skills that employers seek.
• About two third of prison inmates are high school dropouts, and one third of all juvenile offenders read below the fourth-grade level.
• About half of incoming ninth graders in urban, high-poverty schools read three years or more below grade level.

I expressed my frustration that it's tough to boil all of that information into a single statement that explains the intense need. When asked why it seemed so overwhelming, I simply said that "Every single educational outcome that we value - graduation, college success, employability, criminal offending, success in Science & Technology, and global competitiveness - all correlate most strongly with a single factor: proficiency in reading." Lightbulb. And with that, I was much closer to the short, powerful statement needed for marketing materials.

In the end, we hope to have a one page document that outlines the problem, the Reach concept, the research base, the factors that make us unique, and the details about our upcoming pilot program. Eighteen months of work on a single page. In the end, each word will be intentionally selected, and the process is challenging. With each day, the vision gains a little more clarity and our core becomes a little more defined.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Mark