Customizing Know Your Power® for Your Campus

Three College Examples to Make It Yours

The Know Your Power® Bystander Social Marketing Campaign is the result of almost 20 years of collaboration between researchers and practitioners who have worked together to develop, evaluate, and implement a “passive” intervention strategy that increases target audience awareness of the problem of sexual and relationship violence, stalking, and sexual harassment, providing them with tools to intervene when they witness dangerous or potentially dangerous situations.

Know Your Power (KYP) for safe and respectful living and learning communities:

KYP is one of the first and best evaluated bystander intervention marketing campaigns providing effective sexual and relationship violence prevention strategies. It raises awareness on college campuses and increases students’ knowledge of how to intervene to achieve a safe and respectful college community.

Know Your Power is a set of marketing campaigns portraying realistic and provocative scenarios to help students heighten awareness, knowledge and willingness to safely act. It is essential for the scenarios to be realistic, relatable, and provocative to effect change on campus.

Know Your Power marketing campaigns are designed to be flexible with campaign images available for each college community to apply as they see appropriate to best build and maintain awareness of the power a bystander can have to create a safe and respectful living and learning environment on campus.

The Importance of Realistic and Relatable Scenarios:

When implementing Know Your Power, we offer the ability to customize the images in the campaigns to engage your student community. We understand the importance of being able to easily adapt the campaigns to your target audience: your students. The flexibility of KYP enables you to select images with people who look like them, in environments that feel familiar to them, and in situations they are likely to encounter. The flexibility of the program enables you to reflect your college community and to highlight and relate to various identities or student populations (e.g., LGBTQ+, athletes, ROTC, veterans, 21+, commuter students, international students).

It is also important that the selected images for a campaign represent the diversity of your student community and reflect realistic scenarios. Realistic scenarios include topics such as sexual assault, dating violence, stalking, sexist remarks, online abuse, isolation, and alcohol use. Based on the scenario, we offer available imagery to support the integrated campaign which can include posters, post cards, bookmarks, digital messaging and potentially vehicle wraps to achieve high visibility and frequency.

For more information about Know Your Power and the elements included, click here.

Three Examples of Customization for Unique College Communities

Know Your Power marketing campaigns are implemented by many colleges and universities throughout the country and internationally with a common goal of achieving a safe and respectful college community for all. Some choose to customize content and/or imagery to best relate to and appeal to their student population. Below are three examples of colleges who have customized elements of Know Your Power.

College #1: Reedley College

Reedley College is in Fresno County, California and serves over 15,000 students with more than 80% of Reedley’s student body identifying as Latino, Latina, and LatinX. Reedley College is a designated Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in California.

Reedley customized Know Your Power to easily and succinctly link multiple initiatives on campus. The goal was to spur student conversation and engagement on campus. To best reach its student body, Reedley customized its selected campaigns to be in Spanish. Learn more about how Reedley College incorporated KYP as an integral part of creating and maintaining a better and safer college community for all.

Being able to customize Know Your Power for Reedley makes it feel like the program is from us and for our students.

Dr. Eve M. Castellanos, CalWORKs Coordinator, Reedley College, Reedley, CA

College #2: University of Alaska at Fairbanks

This university leverages Know Your Power on its campus and customized the content by incorporating gender neutral pronouns to be more inclusive and representative of its student body. Below is an example of imagery used at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

College #3: University of California, Dominguez Hills

To increase the relatability of the Step In, Speak Up campaign, University of California, Dominquez Hills revised the text bubbles to incorporate the name of the counseling center. This specificity provides more information to the student body as the posters are a useful resource and reference for help.

Many organizations have implemented Know Your Power marketing campaigns in conjunction with Bringing in the Bystander® to build and maintain awareness of the important role all community members play in eliminating violence, harassment, incivility, and discrimination.

Know Your Power is currently available for colleges, but stay tuned, we are currently finalizing the Know Your Power marketing campaigns for high schools.

To discuss your specific goals for your college, please call (603) 815-4190 or email us or use the link below. We welcome the opportunity to discuss how Know Your Power could be customized to serve your unique college community.

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Jennifer Scrafford