I'm going to try to be as specific as possible without giving out too much info... please bear with me.
Part of my job involves educational efforts and community engagement. A few people in my office have identified a need to push information out to high schoolers to reduce a very specific problem occurring throughout the area. In order to do that, we were going to partner with the school system to have a competition of sorts for a tag line that would ultimately be used in a video, shown in a civic responsibility portion of the high school curriculum. This also has the potential to be cut down to a 30 second commercial spot.
Come to find out, we don't have the funds to do a video and we're not sure that the school will be willing to help us out with the video. So, we need another way to get the message out to the high schoolers that is not just pushing out a piece of paper.
High schoolers are a tough population to reach-when I think back to information that was pushed out to me in school, it was mostly in elementary school-especially with recycling. High schoolers are part of the population that is causing the problem, so we need a way to get the information out in an educational outreach effort.
Other ideas? We're not giving up on the video idea, I have some things I'm looking into, but if those don't pan out, I need a plan B.
ETA: This is something that needs to be sustainable and last a few years with minimal effort. Our original idea with the video was to put it on YouTube and provide the link to the teachers.
At first I was going to suggest some sort of competition - maybe through social media - where students could compete for a gift card (even $25 or $50). We do that a lot in my industry when we're trying to get professionals to take our online surveys ... "Send back this survey by [date] to be entered to win an Amazon gift card!"
But that might go against your "sustainable and last a few years with minimal effort" requirement.
I agree with the social media idea and a competition. Maybe you could make a fb page to support your effort and have some kids compete for the best slogan or poster for the issue. The entries can be posted on the fb page and the one with the most "Like"s can win something small and their's will become the official slogan for this campaign. By encouraging people to get on the fb page and vote you will get more people to see info about the topic and the competitors will likely encourage all of their friends to visit the page. If you make it so that you have to "Like" the page in order to vote you can continue to get information out to people because it will show up on their timeline when something additional is posted to the page.
Engage the school's twitter, FB, and PTA. Someone may volunteer to produce a video etc. with you. Parents can be very helpful when it comes to things like this and may donate their services.
Competitions between classes. Maybe have all 3rd block classes come up with a tag line (gives the kids ownership) then select the 4-5 that you like best, have a vote. Winning class gets pizza. If you can afford it, our kids go nuts when an Olive Garden meal is the prize (probably because we're so rural).
You could contact a club in the school about this. Maybe Students Against Destructive Decisions or Student Government?
Have the announcer talk about it at the games, that way the parents hear about it.
Our principal does a weekly phone message. If they do that, ask him/her to talk about it.
DEFINITELY go social media. Right now our kids are all over Twitter and Instagram.
OoOoO thinking as I type here, what if you did an instagram contest? Have them post a picture in relation to the topic with a hashtag? Winner gets Visa gift card?
This has been covered, but find the club at the school most closely aligned with what you're trying to get out there and let them take it on as their big project. Also, if they have seminar/homeroom/advocacy classes, they're often looking for character and community ideas to discuss and sometimes even volunteer hours, so that may be a way to get in there.