SAVE THE CHILDREN
They say if you don’t use it, you lose it, so to keep underserved kids engaged in learning and prepare them for the school year while they were on summer vacation, Save the Children took its youth reading campaign on the road. Along with brand partners T.J.Maxx, SC Johnson and Nickelodeon, the organization traveled from coast to coast on a 10-city tour.
The mobile program served as the face-to-face manifestation of Save the Children’s 100 Days of Reading campaign, which provides tips and activities on the organization’s Instagram account and a microsite to ensure kids are actively engaging in reading and education all summer long. To bring the concept into the real world, Save the Children and its partners worked with local organizations to identify the most underserved elementary school-aged kids in each city, and provided them with hands-on learning activities and essential resources.
The objective was to hand-deliver backpacks filled with school supplies, educational materials and personal care products to 2,000 children in each market. But beyond the bags, the tour provided a platform for engagement and education. At each stop, young attendees were encouraged to participate in a range of educational activities that centered on literacy, math and STEM. An interactive kindergarten readiness activity, for instance, featured a larger-than-life magnetic storybook developed around Nickelodeon’s “Blue’s Clues & You!” program. Similar to Mad Libs, the activity encouraged kids to fill in blanks within the story with their own pictures and words.
There was also a math race game themed around Nickelodeon’s “Blaze and the Monster Machines” series, and a Greatest Catch activity from SC Johnson that taught kids the importance of recycling. Participants used magnetic poles to fish a water bottle out of the “ocean,” then either recycle the bottle or took it to a crafts station to repurpose it.
Rounding out the activities was T.J.Maxx’s Longest Story Ever Told, which empowered kids to help author a book by adding a sentence or drawing to a crowdsourced story. When the campaign wrapped, Save the Children packaged the stories into mini digital books in each market and shared them with the community.
“Bringing together like-minded partners who want to make a difference for children is really key to helping make events like this even more impactful and meaningful for kids because it helps put a little more fuel into the bus tour, so to speak,” says Jennifer Kendra, head of cause marketing and partnership development at Save the Children US. “SC Johnson, for example, really believes in contributing to the wellbeing of communities, and particularly communities where they operate, by supporting initiatives that enhance that quality of life. And they, like many of our other partners, believe that education is an essential part of helping families move out of poverty and have access to greater economic mobility. So it’s bringing together all these like-minded folks into an opportunity for us to really engage hands-on.” (Agencies: Inspira Marketing Group, Norwalk, CT, production and creative; Trinity Displays, Chesterton, IN, mobile build)
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