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NCSBA Reframes Public Education as a Community Asset
The North Carolina School Boards Association's "Public Education Does the Public Good" campaign, created by Baldwin& and launched in July 2024, argues that strong public schools benefit every resident of North Carolina — not only enrolled students — through an integrated mix of animated video, original music, social media assets, and pro-bono billboard placements across the United States.
The North Carolina School Boards Association, known as NCSBA, commissioned the campaign to amplify a message it considers foundational: that well-funded public schools generate community-wide returns. The campaign's central argument positions public education not as a government service for a subset of the population but as civic infrastructure that strengthens the broader fabric of North Carolina communities. In doing so, it directly confronts one of the more persistent political dynamics in the United States — declining public confidence in institutions, including schools — by grounding its appeal in shared economic and social benefit rather than partisan framing.
Baldwin&, a North Carolina-based independent agency, executed the full creative scope on a pro-bono basis across several formats. The anchor deliverable is an animated video spot featuring original music composed and performed by Ghidrah Music, with campaign jingle lyrics written by Baldwin& Senior Project Manager Tim Mislock and illustrations drawn by Baldwin& Studio Artist Ian Westrand. Animation was completed in partnership with production company Awesome Inc. Social media assets, web assets, and billboard creative accompanied the video, broadening the campaign's footprint across the North Carolina market. According to baldwinand.com, the campaign launched during the week of July 8, 2024, with contemporaneous coverage confirming the public launch on July 11, 2024. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 69 out of 100, reflecting solid creative intent and multi-format execution within the constraints of a non-commercial advocacy brief.
Public education advocacy in the United States operates in a contested landscape. The strategic insight driving the NCSBA campaign is that appeals based solely on student outcomes have limited reach among adults without school-age children, while appeals rooted in community economics and shared civic benefit can engage a broader constituency. Baldwin& built the campaign around this reframing, shifting the conversation from "schools for students" to "schools for everyone."
The strategic context in North Carolina is specific. According to the National Education Association, teacher pay and per-pupil funding remain persistent pressure points in state-level education debates, and the NCSBA campaign explicitly names low teacher pay as one of the challenges public schools face. This grounds the campaign's advocacy in documented, verifiable grievances rather than abstract idealism. The campaign's messaging aligns with arguments advanced by organisations such as publicschoolsfirstnc.org, which has documented the connection between school funding adequacy and community outcomes in North Carolina.
In the United States, the competitive environment for public education advocacy includes well-resourced national organisations such as the National Education Association and state-level groups aligned with charter school expansion, some of which carry significant advertising budgets. Against that backdrop, NCSBA's decision to pursue an emotionally resonant, creatively distinctive animated campaign — rather than a conventional public affairs approach — reflects a deliberate choice to earn attention rather than buy it at scale. The pro-bono billboard placements extend the campaign's physical presence across North Carolina without requiring paid outdoor media investment, a practical solution for an association operating within non-profit budget constraints. According to merca20.com, coverage of the campaign emphasised precisely this community-wide framing as the defining strategic choice.
Baldwin& chose animation as the primary creative vehicle for the NCSBA campaign. The decision gives the work a visual warmth and accessibility that live-action advocacy spots rarely achieve, signalling optimism rather than alarm — a tone calibrated to invite rather than mobilise.
The illustrations were created by Baldwin& Studio Artist Ian Westrand, whose in-house contribution gave the visual language a handcrafted quality consistent with the campaign's community-centred message. The jingle lyrics were written by Baldwin& Senior Project Manager Tim Mislock, a direct expression of the agency's documented ethos of integrating team members' creative side hustles into client work. According to baldwinand.com, Jennifer Hazelett, Director of Account Management at Baldwin&, described this approach as going "beyond a traditional agency's scope through artistic contributions from two of our talented team members." Music composition and performance were handled by Ghidrah Music, bringing professional production values to what began as an internally generated lyrical concept.
The animation itself was completed in partnership with Awesome Inc., a production company that translated Westrand's illustrations and Mislock's lyrics into a finished video spot. The result is a campaign film that carries original intellectual property — visual and musical — developed entirely within and adjacent to the Baldwin& team. This vertical integration of creative talent is unusual in advocacy advertising and gives the NCSBA campaign a coherent authorial voice from concept through delivery. According to A Publicedworks, the campaign's creative components also extended to social media assets, web assets, and design work applied to pro-bono billboard spaces, ensuring the animated spot's visual identity travelled consistently across every touchpoint in North Carolina and beyond.
Verified performance data for the NCSBA "Public Education Does the Public Good" campaign is available from documented sources. According to clapboard.com, the campaign video recorded 966,354 views, accompanied by 285 likes and 6 comments, yielding a like-to-view ratio of approximately 0.03 percent. For a public education advocacy campaign operating without a national paid media budget, crossing close to one million views represents meaningful organic and earned distribution in the United States market.
The engagement ratio warrants honest analysis. A 0.03 percent like-to-view ratio is low by conventional social content benchmarks, which typically indicates that the video reached audiences primarily through non-opt-in distribution — embedded placements, press coverage, or paid promotion — rather than through communities already invested in the cause. This is structurally consistent with a campaign designed to shift opinion among unconvinced audiences rather than energise existing advocates. Reaching persuadable viewers who do not self-identify as public education supporters is, by design, harder to convert into visible engagement signals.
According to merca20.com, the campaign received positive coverage in August 2024 emphasising its community-wide framing, and baldwinand.com documented the agency's full creative contribution. The pro-bono nature of the work — spanning animation, music, social assets, and billboard design — means the campaign delivered demonstrable public affairs value without the media investment that typically underlies view counts of this scale in North Carolina and across the broader United States advocacy space. The Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects the campaign's creative ambition and multi-channel coherence, set against the engagement challenges inherent to non-commercial public education advocacy.
The NCSBA "Public Education Does the Public Good" campaign is a 2024 public education advocacy initiative created by Baldwin& for the North Carolina School Boards Association. It argues that well-funded public schools benefit entire North Carolina communities, not only enrolled students, using animated video, original music, social assets, and pro-bono billboard placements.
Baldwin& created the campaign. The North Carolina-based independent agency handled concept, production, and execution on a pro-bono basis, with jingle lyrics by Senior Project Manager Tim Mislock, illustrations by Studio Artist Ian Westrand, animation by Awesome Inc., and music by Ghidrah Music, according to baldwinand.com.
The campaign launched during the week of July 8, 2024, with a confirmed public launch date of July 11, 2024, in North Carolina. According to baldwinand.com, the campaign was developed to build community support for public schools across the United States and received coverage from merca20.com in August 2024.
The campaign video recorded 966,354 views, according to clapboard.com. The like-to-view ratio was approximately 0.03 percent, consistent with a campaign reaching persuadable audiences rather than pre-existing public education advocates, which reflects the campaign's strategic intent in the North Carolina and broader United States market.
Baldwin& is a North Carolina-based independent agency that created the NCSBA campaign pro bono. According to baldwinand.com, Jennifer Hazelett, Director of Account Management, stated the agency felt personally invested in supporting public schools and contributed original creative work, including staff-authored jingle lyrics and hand-drawn illustrations, beyond a traditional agency scope.
The Clapboard Score for the NCSBA "Public Education Does the Public Good" campaign is 69 out of 100. The score reflects solid creative ambition and coherent multi-channel execution across animated video, music, social assets, and billboards, set against the engagement challenges typical of non-commercial public education advocacy in the United States.
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