See Beautiful Grant Recipient: Rise Up Marketing Fellowship

The feature below is brought to you by Rise Up Marketing Fellowship, an organization that received a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about our giving initiatives, please click here.
 
To learn more about the featured organization, please visit their website here.

2020 was a tough year for everyone, with COVID and the racial justice movement being two of the most prominent and life-changing. As companies wrestled with how to respond to both, conversations around diversity, inclusion, and racial equity took center stage within many businesses and organizations. Pledges were made, social graphics we posted. But largely, the groundswell of momentum stopped there.

As a digital marketing agency dedicated to the nonprofit space, Media Cause understood so many of the inherent challenges in changing our country’s social and economic systems. But we also saw the beauty in recognizing our own opportunity—and obligation–to do better within our own industries. So rather than just talking about what to do next, we decided to address the lack of diversity in the marketing, advertising, and communications fields head on—by taking action to change them.

Several members of our leadership team spent months researching hiring trends, and having one-on-one conversations with both agency leaders and aspiring talent. And while we recognized that the factors contributing to the diversity issues in our industry are complex and nuanced, one of the biggest insights that came out of this research was an experience-based Catch 22:

It’s hard for someone to get their first job in the field without previous experience, but it’s equally as hard to gain experience without having had a previous job.

It’s a dangerous (but not uncommon) double-standard, and it creates an unfair advantage for a select, and often non-diverse, group of candidates: recent college grads who have attended “leading” 4 year universities with specialized professional degrees; people with family or friend networks that can assist with getting interviews; and individuals who are in the fortunate financial position to be able to accept unpaid internships in order to build the experience needed to land a full-time entry level role.

We knew that in order to affect long-term change at all levels of the industry, we’d need to reimagine the way things work from the bottom up—starting with the recruiting, training, and retention processes.

So we developed the RiseUPMarketing Fellowship, a purpose-driven career development program that works to break down the barriers that so many diverse candidates face when trying to break-into the marketing, advertising, or communications fields.

The RiseUP Marketing Fellowship is based on a few key principles:

Diversity: Many companies define diversity by race, gender, or ethnicity—characteristics that are physically visible on a website’s “Our Team” page. However, this definition doesn’t take into account the many other factors that are also discriminated against in many hiring decisions: age, non-traditional educational background, transferable but not exactly matching professional experience, gender identification, neurodiversity, and more. RiseUP is open to ALL applicants who have struggled to get their feet in the door, not just one specific segment—because not only is there beauty in bringing people with different experiences and backgrounds together, but there’s also greater beauty, and impact, in the work they can create.

Access: In order to make marketing, advertising, and communications careers truly accessible to everyone, we believe in providing a fair living stipend while they’re learning, training, and gaining experience. This means getting rid of the industry’s traditional “unpaid internship” model, and providing enough support so that Fellows don’t feel the need to earn additional income outside of the program to support themselves. Financial independence is SO beautiful. Access also means providing our Fellows with all the tools they need to be successful—including fully-covered online training courses and certifications, a computer, fast internet, and a home-work setup or access to an office.

Experience: Virtual education has come a long way in the last few years, and is a great start for building tactical skills and practical knowledge. But in order to be job-ready, developing professionals need the opportunity to work on real assignments for real-world clients. Not only does this help them understand how their “classroom” learning translates into specific actions and deliverables, but also helps them develop the soft skills that are needed to succeed, like relationship management, project management, teamwork, giving and receiving feedback, and professional communications. Our Fellows start shadowing real account teams from Week 1, and become contributing members of those teams along the way—helping them learn, grow, and discover the places their skills truly shine.

Impact: We believe that there’s always more good to be done to help change systems, expand opportunities, and improve the world. Much of our Fellows’ hands-on training time is spent assisting incredible nonprofits with pro bono marketing services—not only building their own skills, confidence, and resumes, but also helping amazing organizations fulfill more of their missions. There’s nothing more rewarding, or beautiful, than that.

While the RiseUP Marketing Fellowship is still young, we’ve already seen its impact. From our first two cohorts, five of the six Fellows received full-time jobs upon completing their training, with the sixth deciding to pursue an education in design. We welcomed our 3rd cohort into the Fellowship in January 2022, and continue to be inspired by their curiosity, passion, and ambition.

With each new year, we’re also continuing to learn and evolve the program. Since its inception, we’ve expanded the curriculum, streamlined the structure, provided more opportunities for networking and mentorship, and diversified the resources and support available at all times. However, we recognize that in order to make an even greater impact, we need to be able to scale the Fellowship to serve a much greater number of people. We are now at a stage where we are planning to raise outside funding from Foundations and corporate sponsors to enable this growth, and bring more agencies into the mix, to host, train, and sponsor more Fellows.

The See Beautiful Grant we recently received is incredible validation that we’re headed in the right direction, and the grant itself will help us provide our Fellows with more of the training they need to succeed. We’re so appreciative of all of the support, and are looking forward to building a more diverse and equitable industry for years to come.

Submitted by: Amy Small