The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a Kansas City-based nonprofit that’s spent decades equipping young people with the skills and resources they’ll need to have a great career or become successful as entrepreneurs. It’s a mission that starts with rethinking education. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation partnered with Freethink to showcase how Kauffman grantee, Real World Learning Initiative is helping to cultivate entrepreneurs, and exploring the role entrepreneurship plays in closing the racial wealth gap.
As technology and the economy evolve, so too should the ways schools educate high school students. Most school systems, according to the Kauffman Foundation, need to change quickly to better prepare kids for the realities of the modern economy.
To meet that need, the foundation developed the Real World Learning Initiative, a framework for offering high school students the practical skills and hands-on experience necessary to navigate adult life, postsecondary education, and careers.
By unpacking complex stories about innovative initiatives and a mission that everyone can get behind (promoting entrepreneurship and closing the racial wealth gap), Freethink was able to deliver instant insight to Kauffman’s mission and capacity, while inspiring the imagination for what it could do for future partners.
Freethink produced a custom documentary that demonstrated the impact of the Real World Learning Initiative, a framework for offering high school students the practical skills and hands-on experience necessary to navigate adult life, postsecondary education, and careers. ““It’s time to move away from this chalkboard-era of teaching and learning,” said Mark Bedell, superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools. “We need to be modern, because the world and the economy that these kids are graduating into is not a traditional model.”
Freethink distributed this marquee documentary across Freethink owned sites and social channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Linkedin to engage Freethink’s audience, audiences indirectly impacted by the racial wealth gap, as well as broader audiences. Kauffman Foundation was granted ownership rights of this documentary along with a robust distribution plan that included customized and targeted campaigns across social media. We implemented SEO optimization, created series art, dedicated articles, customized cut downs and clips; we published across news partners, niche online communities, newsletters and contributed real-time comment responses to encourage conversation. Through the campaign, we measured and fine-tuned tactics to optimize where the video was organically performing well to boost performance.
The documentary was an engrossing hit, with nearly 650,000 views and 33% of them being completed views on a 5:14 video on the internet. That engaged performance for a long form content is notable in a crowded media landscape and competing sources for attention.
Even though it was branded content, our audience was captivated by the video. We were able to identify a powerful Kaufman Foundation story and frame it in a way that would capture our civic-minded audience, and they delivered the highest engagement and completion rates among other targeted groups. This proves that Freethink is able to tell brand stories that educate, entertain and engage our audience.
Comments from viewers were overwhelmingly positive, praising the socially conscious and mission-driven work. Many viewers shared their appreciation for Kauffman Foundations’ work, how impressed they were by the educators they work with, and more importantly, an interest in getting involved and working for organizations that work to share knowledge in entrepreneurship -- the branded content providing an additional benefit of higher visibility for future recruitments.
