In February, a select number of Edelman colleagues across different teams volunteered their time at a Charity Challenge day. To Mark #RaceEqualityWeek, we partnered up with the following 3 charities:
- National Governance Association - supporting and representing school governors & trustees, and has an ongoing campaign to recruit more volunteers from ethnic minority communities.
- The Equality Trust - They work to improve the quality of life in the UK by reducing economic and social inequality.
- Music Action International - Creating life-changing music programmes with survivors of war, torture and armed-conflict, with the majority of their participants being refugees and asylum seekers from ethnic minority communities.
We caught up with Andrew McLagan, Account Manager at Edelman Smithfield, who stepped outside of his normal working world for a day, and volunteered his time to help Music Action International.
What is your professional background and expertise?
I work in Edelman’s financial services and capital markets team. On a normal day you might find me creating media strategies for clients, digging through data, talking to journalists or translating often complex financial information into digestible stories for the media.
What were you hoping to gain from volunteering with your team through Media Trust?
I wanted to be able to step outside of my normal working world and use my skills as a communicator to help an organisation that might benefit from that expertise. It was also an opportunity to work alongside other talented colleagues from around Edelman.
Tell us about your experience
Our team was partnered with Music Action International as part of Media Trust’s Charity Challenge Day for Race Equality Week. Music Action International creates life-changing music programmes with survivors of war, torture and persecution to overcome trauma, connect divided communities and raise awareness of human rights abuses. For me, it was a particularly interesting organisation to be placed with, as my partner had recently come back from Colombia working with victims of the country’s armed conflict.
The challenge was to help Music Action International devise a social media and comms strategy for a campaign it had planned later on this year. As part of that we created something which could be replicated for future campaigns.
How might/will your support impact the charity you worked with?
I hope that the team at Music Action International came away from the day with a clearer picture of how to effectively execute the campaign they have planned, even with the limited resources that they have for comms and social media. I don’t want to give too much away but it is something you should definitely listen out for later on this year. The project is very exciting and highlights the amazing work they do with young refugee and asylum seeker groups in Manchester and London.
What was the impact that volunteering had on you?
I can’t wait to get involved in more projects like this with Edelman. It is really rewarding to be able to step aside from the day job and work alongside organisations doing meaningful work in the community. If anyone is considering volunteering their skills with Media Trust I would 100% recommend giving it a go.