Ask Ari

USC was never what one might call a low-pressure environment, and the scandals that rocked the university in 2017 and 2018 didn’t help. So their Office of Campus Wellbeing and Education (CWE), in collaboration with the Engineering school, developed a way to help students cope: Ask Ari.

The app allows any member of the USC community to access resources and recommendations for an exhaustive range of wellbeing-related issues, including the ones they might not want to ask another human about. And it couldn’t have come at a better time.

But before students would download and actually use Ask Ari, they would need to know that what happens with Ari stays with Ari. More than that, they'd need to feel like Ari gets them. One of CWE’s prime directives, though, was “no negativity.” So we had to message it in a “we feel you” way without letting the feels take over. Keep it real, but keep it light.

Our messaging spoke to the needs of the collective USC consciousness, but in a way that would lift the mood while offering more long-term solutions for turning those frowns upside down. More joy. Less “Oy.”