Telling the story: archetype-driven, multilingual outreach campaign reaches 5 million
Guided by a detailed co-design process with its local Citizenship Advisory Committee (CAC), Dalberg Design launched a multilingual outreach campaign to support individual naturalization journeys across the region.
From March through September 2025, participants worked together to create and launch educational materials in multiple languages that would be shared by a network of community messengers, including four local ethnic influencers, 25 ethnic media fellows, and more than two dozen ethnic publications and radio stations.
Many of the questions these communicators set out to answer were straightforward: Who is eligible to apply for citizenship? Who can help? How can individuals get training or financial help for the process? And, most importantly, what are the concrete benefits of citizenship that you gain by navigating this process?
For guidance, audiences were directed to BecomeACitizenToday.com(opens in new window), a one-stop informational website in multiple languages featuring facts and nonprofit resources, developed by Houston-based Lopez Negrete Communications(opens in new window) and supported by Houston Endowment.
To tailor messaging for Houston’s diverse audiences, the design team developed a key innovation: five “archetypes,” or profiles meant to reflect common experiences among potential applicants. “The team began to notice patterns of beliefs, capacities, and access to networks of support,” said W. KaNeesha Allen, community collaboration lead for Dalberg Design(opens in new window).
Chosen for their communication skills and devoted audiences, four social media influencers achieved the pilot’s highest engagement and action rates. Liz Arreola(opens in new window), Bell White(opens in new window), Alex Solis(opens in new window), and Jennie Arellano(opens in new window) told Houston’s naturalization story through the lens of their own personalities. As a group, Dalberg reported, the four influencers reached 32,556 viewers on Instagram, 6,288 on Facebook, and 2,653 on TikTok.
Other content emerged from the work of 25 media fellows: writers and communicators working closely with Houston’s ethnic media outlets. These journalists produced a total of 50 naturalization-focused articles for the city’s hundreds of thousands of African, Latin American, and Asian immigrants.
Altogether, Dalberg said, the multilingual outreach campaign reached more than 5 million viewers. A total of 14,764 people liked, commented on or shared what they saw. And among immigrants and refugees who participated in related programs, 24% said they learned about the Greater Houston Citizenship Project through traditional or social media—including content from the influencers, media fellows, and paid postings from the outreach campaign.
The campaign created a durable set of tools: informed and committed influencers, journalists, and advocates; trainings and toolkits for future campaigns; and a powerful library of video testimonies from Houstonians who successfully became U.S. citizens.
