Cameron Milne's TIE Case Study

I couldn’t look at another brief. After five years working in agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, writing countless ‘decks,’ devising a multitude of ‘business growth opportunities,’ spouting endless smart sounding phrases in workshops, I needed a break.

Many of us agency folk enter the agency world with the optimistic belief that communications can be a force for good: brands can amplify progressive social causes or even, in some instances, pioneer them. Alas, in reality we spend 98% of our time doing anything but aiding social progress. I don’t mean to demean the industry I’ve committed my working life to, but rather to appreciate its reality so I can better understand how the skills I use every day can actually be best applied to social problems. We’re a talented bunch, in our own way. We’re creatively minded business people, strategically thoughtful dreamers, analytical observers. The skills we learn from building brands are useful to various industries, but none more so than the third sector. As someone who gains immense personal satisfaction from merely being “useful,” I wanted to find a way to help an organization in a meaningful way.

With the support of Jon Steele, director of WPP’s Fellowship program, I was encouraged to apply for a placement with TIE. Several months later, I was landing (poorly slept, luggageless) in Recife to help Somos Professores, an educational NGO, distill how they could best help the public-school students of North East Brazil prepare for the demands of a fast-evolving postschool world. The public-school system was not suitably preparing students with the collaborative, creative, or technological skills required to succeed in the modern workplace.

Access to a future facing education is becoming a greater and greater force in driving the social divide.

By the time I had arrived, the team had done an extensive amount of research on the barriers schools were facing when looking to impose more future thinking curricula and teaching methods. Our ultimate goal was to better prepare students for their lives after school, but the barriers to achieving that goal were various and multifaceted. As when working on a new brand brief, it’s essential to diagnose the problem you’re trying to solve. And as with any brand brief, there are multiple issues to overcome: teachers had no time to learn new methodologies; they had no funding to buy new equipment; the curriculum was restrictive, changes would take years of bureaucratic wrangling; the value of obtaining a progressive education wasn’t evident for some families from lower income backgrounds.

Over the past few years, Somos Professores had built a crowd funding platform which allowed teachers to raise money for particular learning projects they were looking to run in classes. This solution directly tackled the funding gap teachers felt was standing between their desire to run project-based classes and their ability to actually do so. Crowdfunding was unquestionably helping teachers run more collaborative learning projects, however the Somos Professores team believed there was a more effective way to reach the ultimate goal at a grander scale. We went back to the research.

We began to prototype four different initiatives which Somos Professores could roll out across Recife’s public-school system. We defined what the activities would be, how we would engage

schools and teachers, and how we would fund the operation. I was using skills I’d gained from stints in market research, brand strategy, communications planning, and creative development: it was a different context, for a different purpose, but the way of thinking remained familiar.

Once we had developed robust prototype business plans, we workshopped them with teachers, members of school boards, students, and experts from the NGO space. External input was essential to developing an effective initiative; we all too often overlook some of the most poignant perspectives of those living inside the problem we’re trying to solve. This workshop ensured we understood the unforeseen issues with our prototype initiatives, allowing us to evolve our ideas before restructuring the organization around a new set of services.

We’d covered a lot of ground in the four weeks I’d been with Somos Professores. I enjoyed the pace in which we were able to move, enacting a learning within days rather than months (as I had become accustomed to in the agency world). It was also wonderfully fulfilling to work with and learn from people directly impacted by the cause we were championing. Again, so rarely do we get out of metropolitan bubble in the agency world, so rarely do we endeavor to truly understand the people we claim to know so well. And finally, it was deeply rewarding to discover that the skills I had garnered over the first five years of my career had useful application outside the industry in which I learned them.

My TIE experience far surpassed everything I was hoping it would be. Just as NGOs have so much to learn from the corporate world, the corporate world has a great deal to take from the third sector: purposeful work, direct engagement with social issues, effectiveness over everything. I have already enacted many of my learnings and new appreciations in my new work in the new business department of an ad agency. I resolve to keep my TIE experience at the front of my mind in all my future work.