College Board is a nonprofit that clears a path for all students to own their future through the AP Program, SAT Suite, BigFuture, and more. As part of the organization’s purview to make AP courses more accessible and attractive to Black students who have been historically underrepresented, College Board brought on Storytelling for Good to conduct a deep listening and messaging process for two of its newest classes: AP Seminar and AP Computer Science Principles.
We knew that in order to produce messaging that resonated most with College Board’s target audiences, we would need to activate on multiple research fronts and use everything we collected to inform the path forward. With this in mind, we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with internal stakeholders as well as both Black students who had previously taken AP courses and those who hadn’t. We then crafted messaging for both courses and went back to our student interview subjects for message testing. Recognizing that the primary factor driving students not to enroll in AP courses was a lack of a sense of belonging, we finalized messaging that turned this belief on its head and then encouraged the College Board to employ Black students as messengers for their peers.