Connect Chicago

This effort will link more than 150 public computer centers across the city in a
common campaign to increase digital literacy and knowledge about Internet resources..

MK Communications is the vendor responsible for delivering on this portion of the Public Computer Centers project, which is to create a campaign that will build community around public computer centers all over the city.  When taken as a whole, the public computer center infrastructure in Chicago constitutes an amazing resource for all, and this program will build on that.

Our communications strategy has two main components:

  • Connect the five agencies which are a part of this program—the Chicago Public Library, Department of Family Support Services, City Colleges of Chicago, Chicago Cook Workforce Investment Council, and Chicago Housing Authority—to each other, so as to form a community of public computer centers
  • Communicate the existence of public computer centers and training opportunities to the general public

The campaign consists of a number of components:

  • Web site: contains information on training resources and a map-based tool for finding public computer centers, training, and other resources in Chicago. The code for the map-based portion of this Web site will be published as open source, including a database management tool built on Google Fusion tables. The site will live on the Smart Chicago Collaborative EC2 instance from Amazon Web Services
  • Agency-specific marketing: print and Web materials focused on the unique training and resources at each place
  •  Public computer center open house at a select number of locations
  • Public transit Ads
  • JCDecaux news racks & bus shelters city kiosk Ads
  • Blog posts highlighting the availability of the resources and individual successes
  • Facebook page and Twitter account
  • Quarterly e-newsletter