CHALLENGE |
Child Care in America and in Utah is an important issue that is challenging local communities and families, as more and more parents need to balance family and work.. However there is a large gap between perception and reality. For the most part decision-makers are operating under the premise that mothers should stay at home with their children when the reality is there are more and more mothers entering the workforce than ever before. In fact, the percentage of working mothers in Utah is higher than the national average — in Utah 64 percent of mothers work compared to 60 percent nationally. There is also a gap between how many licensed child care facilities are available and the need for child care providers. The Department of Labor has made child care a priority, and is implementing test market communications campaigns.

SOLUTION |
The Utah Department of Workforce Services’ Office of Child Care hired Vanguard Media Group to develop and implement a multi-year public information campaign. With this in mind Vanguard conducted a series of focus groups and developed a campaign to make people aware of the role that quality care can play in childhood development. The campaign — through advertising messages, collateral materials, community relations activities and media relations endeavors — objective in the short term is to increase overall awareness of the benefit of quality child care and have parents and the public be able to identify what constitutes quality child care. The long term objective is to increase the number of children in quality child care, improve the qualifications of child care providers and increase the number of quality facilities available