Incentive Pledge Project

This page describes a sub-project intended to promote awareness and motivation for the initiative among students, especially to promote continuing engagement throughout the year. The idea is that sports, entertainment and other personalities can pledge incentives that would apply nationally or to a local area (e.g. that they would visit a couple of schools in some area that achieved particularly well).  Sports teams or companies could also offer incentives (e.g. free tickets to a sports event to students in schools in their area that achieve better than a certain result or visits to companies or theme parks, etc.). Etc.

In one way, this page describes a part of the main initiative web site.  But it is a part that is expected to have great impact on the overall success of the initiative.

As the Initiative Kickoff starts and people start talking about the initiative, we will enc0urage a number of organizations and individuals to make a special kind of pledge that should:

  1. Result in another round of publicity
  2. Add to the sense of momentum of the entire initiative
  3. Have special impact on the students involved

The concept is quite simple.  Part of the incentive web site will consist of an Incentive Pledge Board.  This is an interface where high profile organizations can pledge incentives to classes and schools if they succeed in achieving a significant degree of the initiatives goals.  E.g.:

  1. Sports Teams, Theme Parks, Theater/Concerts & other venues of high interest to young people will be strongly lobbied to publicly pledge incentives to the students of schools that achieve higher than a certain % (80%?) of students that achieve at least a certain % (95?) of grade level mastery (the % of students and % mastery are variables and organizations might even offer multiple different levels of incentives for different levels of achievements – e.g. 80+% achievement gets free tickets and 90+% gets being called onto the field for special honors and meeting with team members, etc.).
  2. Sports, entertainment, business and political personalities will be strongly encouraged to pledge things like pledging to visit schools that achieve higher than a certain % (80%?) of students that achieve at least a certain % (95%?) of grade level mastery.
  3. Others will be encouraged to be very creative in pledges (e.g. computing devices to all students in schools where more than 98% of students achieve 95%+ grade level mastery, VIP free meal tickets for n months, free class attendance to programming classes or judo classes, or whatever).

Part of the strategy will be to:

  1. Publicize the growth in the number of incentives as a second wave of publicity for the initiative in general (following the city Kickoff rallies over several days) to strengthen the sense very strong momentum around the pledging of incentives so that it will be very “in” to pledge. And given how easy it is, there should be little resistance to pledging.
  2. Encourage pledgers of significant incentives to make public announcements of their pledges (press conferences, photo ops, etc.). It all contributes to the sense of momentum and keeping the incentive at the top of people’s minds.
  3. As examples of incentive pledges become known, pledgers will be encouraged to outdo one another with imaginative incentives.

In the classroom, the incentives can be kept on the students’ minds.

  1. The web site will isolate out all incentives that could apply to the local school and create a local list that can be posted at the front of the class.
  2. A notice would be sent to the teacher every time someone adds an incentive that would apply to the local school. So the students can be informed there is “another one” every few days.

Celebrity incentive pledgers could create periodic videos reminding the students that they have faith in them and are looking forward to meeting them (in their school or at a sports event, etc.).

Getting started:

It is intended that a special team will take on this project and start the reach-out campaign to appropriate potential partner organizations for the Incentive Pledge Campaign in the near future.  If you would like to be part of this team, or if you are affiliated with an organization that is involved in Public Service efforts of organizations or individuals or encouraging education in general and would like to find out more about the initiative or how you could be involved, please contact us at one of the following addresses:

Thank you for your interest in improving education and the future prospects of our society.