Evaluation of the Boss of Me Campaign

BSCF

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

In 2006, the BSCF commissioned groundbreaking research on dating violence which prompted the initiation for a youth media campaign, “Boss of Me (BOM),” advising teens on how to defuse early relationship conflicts. Two years later, campaign tools developed to manage their personal “drama” and defuse harmful situations before they start was pilot tested. The following year, the campaign’s reach was expanded statewide through a partnership with Youth Radio. The campaign involved radio, texting, a revamped website, and a deeper social media presence. A unique aspect of the way the campaign is set up is that it involves youth “ambassadors” who lead these efforts, generating content and organizing BOM events.

Westat evaluated the following components to determine the reach and effectiveness of this multimedia campaign:

• A population-based web survey with 14- to 18-year-olds in San Francisco and Los Angeles
• A customer satisfaction survey at the campaign’s web site
• Intercept interviews at community events
• Monitoring of program reach over the campaign’s website, social networking sites
  (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube), and cell phone text messaging
• Content analysis of user-generated materials
• Strategic document review
• Stakeholder interviewing

The evaluation results were used to inform the teen dating violence prevention field about which social media are most effective for outreach, which messages and content engage the target audience, and how to reach new audiences (e.g., teen males). The Foundation has compiled lessons learned from BOM, about defusing conflict to prevent teen dating violence, into a multimedia presentation. View the Dialing Down the Drama site to learn how the campaign was developed, its key elements, and the lessons learned by the Foundation and its partners over the course of the project.