That National Council of La Raza (NCLR) has again partnered with the writers of the Baldo comic strip to send key messages to the Hispanic community. Universal Press Syndicate notes:

Hector Cantú and Carlos Castellanos, creators of the comic strip, Baldo, are encouraging Latinos to become activists in their communities. During the week of July 3, 2006, the strip... will address issues and challenges that face Latinos in the United States. The week of strips also points out the power of voting... Gracie, one of the strip’s characters and Baldo’s strong-willed little sister, will bring up issues such as AIDS awareness, immigration, healthcare and education...” The strip will encourage Latinos to visit the website of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) to learn more about these issues and how to affect change in their communities.

Two examples of the strip, from July 7 and July 8, show how links to NCLR's site are front and center in the strips. It is important to note that the team focused the messages on specific sub-pages, rather than a general URL. Not only does this take people directly to the most relevant information, but it also spreads traffic throughout the site, exposing more users to interior pages.

NCLR has clearly found a new and valuable delivery channel, likely reaching user it might otherwise not have reached, and doing so with the web as a secondary channel. This is an effective model to emulate (we would recommend making their landing pages even more targeted than NCLR has, but they are on the right track). What are the results in terms of web traffic? They are somewhat inconclusive. NCLR's traffic reached a new plateau in the last few months as the national debate on immigration and related issues played strongly to the organization's cause. The debate has quieted slightly recently, but NCLR's traffic remains solid; part of that could be new traffic from the campaign. It is apparent that one sub-site, the Lideres site for youth leadership, got a significant traffic bump on and around the day its URL was featured. We would suspect that the viral nature of comics online made the campaign particularly successful for reaching younger users.