Valores para toda la vida - Boy Scouts of America begins outreach in Spanish to attract more members

Friday, October 09, 2009

Here's one more reason why a language like Spanish is not destined to be swallowed up by English in the United States (as was the case with German, Polish, etc.) - given the large numbers (45 million or so) of people that speak Spanish in the country it's easy to find articles on Company X or Group Y that have come to the conclusion that creating content in Spanish would be the best way to increase membership after noticing that the Spanish-speaking population is much less interested in the company's or group's products or ideas. Having such a huge population that can be appealed to by groups and businesses is self-sustaining, with many using the language in advertising to appeal to this large group, thereby creating more content in the language and making it more useful in daily life, which drives more businesses and groups to begin using it too. According to the article, Boy Scouts of America did the same thing in deciding to create a manual in Spanish and commercials to promote the organization to Spanish speakers as a response to the fact that Latinos make up 20% of children in the US but only 3% of Scouts, which is a huge unexplored area for them that should be easy to appeal to. Here are a few of their ads:







Current membership is 2.8 million (half that in 1972) and they hope to double it by next year. Their home page as well has a para más información button on the top left that sends you to here, so the home page is available in Spanish too.

For an article in Spanish on the campaign see here.

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