UM Works to Free The Children

UM’s partnership with Free the Children builds awareness for the organization and rallies the youth community. 

Objective

In 2010, UM began a unique partnership with Free the Children (FTC), the world’s leading youth empowerment organization raising awareness for the need for sustainable education programs across the globe. UM's passion for FTC’s values and “adopt a village” model led FTC to look to us to help build youth engagement and support their overall fundraising goals.

Process

In order to engage youth and mobilize them to get involved in FTC’s mission, UM needed to empower them, freeing them from the idea that they are powerless to change the world. 

In addition to hugely motivational organization-wide employee fundraising programs, UM was committed to helping bring FTC’s message of youth empowerment to communities of active and involved young people.

To build awareness for the FTC cause and rally the youth community, we created an AOR planning team to support FTC from a number of strategic perspectives with the ultimate goal of driving adoption and expansion for their movement.

UM created enthusiasm at the media-owner level, by orchestrating a series of one-on-one meetings with the charismatic founder of Free the Children, Craig Kielburger. In a short amount of time, UM has executed awareness campaigns with some of the most well-known media properties – from Facebook to AOL to Seventeen Magazine to Spotify, with many more in the works. 

Results

Over the course of our relationship, we’ve not only helped FTC engage youth, but we’ve also rallied our own employees to provide support for the organization by collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars through donations from our clients and employees. 

Employee mobilization has been so strong that when UM asked for people to donate a day‘s pay, we got almost 80% participation in our offices.

UM has provided support to over 50 people, from clients to employees, to travel to Kenyan villages to build schools and to help local communities with sustainable development projects, such as clean water gathering and dedicated health centers. 

In 2012, the thousands of young people involved with FTC programs raised over $5.4M for over 500 separate causes.