The Century Council, in partnership with Sports Illustrated for Kids, called on us to design and develop the asklistenlearn.com website. The goal of the site is to encourage and educate kids 8-13 to “Say ‘Yes’ to a healthy lifestyle, and ‘No’ to underage drinking.” Our approach: to build a community by rewarding kids who pledge to avoid alcohol with “Ask, Listen, Learn Team” status. In Q&A features, “Superstar” athletes, like Apolo Anton Ohno and Dara Torres, deliver straight talk about alcohol.

 The decision not to drink is presented as part of an overall healthy lifestyle rather than using the "just say no" approach. Because the focus has changed and because The Century Council’s partner is now Sports Illustrated for Kids, we needed to rebrand the campaign to be more sports-oriented.

Once kids have taken the pledge, they are part of the Ask, Listen, Learn Team and can tell stories about what makes them unique on their profile pages. The profile is displayed in a baseball-card-style collectible, which they can customize with their picture and update with details about their favorite subjects, sports, or community activities. Registered team members earn “virtual medals” which are displayed on their profile page each time they play the games, a feature that gives them an incentive to dig deeper, learning more with each play.

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For the last three years, we've partnered with our friends at The Century Council to create a holiday eCard, and every year, they make us raise the bar. For 2009, we created a game for them based on the arcade classic Frogger, called Holiday Hop. Instead of a frog, a family of gingerbread cookies is trying to cross the street without crumbling. As a twist, and to make this more relevant to The Century Council's message, we added drunk drivers to up the difficulty. So watch out!

We also used this game at their holiday event on the Hill (see their flickr set here), which was widely lauded as "the greatest Hill event ever." No lie. And if you can't tell in the photos, we made a custom "dance mat" for the game (similar to arcade dancing games), so you got to jump around to control your gingerbread cookie family.

So, as always, be careful on the roads this holiday season - don't drive drunk, and don't assume others are as smart as you are!

Happy holidays from Actual Size!

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