UMSL can help facilitate Build-A-Bear Foundation donation to HavenHouse

Sisters Breana and Kayla, from Brookport, Illinois, were among the the to start with HavenHouse attendees to acquire furry close friends courtesy of a donation from Develop-A-Bear Foundation. UMSL communication pupils helped arrange the donation and produced a online video about it in their Communication Strategies course. (Photo courtesy of HavenHouse St. Louis)

It was a story readymade to heat people’s hearts for the getaway time.

Create-A-Bear Basis last month made a donation of far more than 680 “furry friends” to HavenHouse St. Louis, a hospital hospitality property giving lodging and other accommodations to out-of-city people with loved kinds receiving clinical treatment in space hospitals.

Katie Huggard, Mark Stiegemeier and the rest of their classmates enrolled in “COMM 4100: Interaction Campaigns” at the College of Missouri–St. Louis were being tasked with figuring out how to ideal capture the tale and bring it to a broader audience.

The class serves as the capstone for UMSL pupils searching for a community relations certificate. Associate Instructing Professor Jill Alexander issues them to build a PR marketing campaign, and this semester they’ve been working on behalf of HavenHouse.

“We talked a great deal about social media techniques and how to distribute their title, how to get data about them to far more people,” Stiegemeier mentioned.

The Establish-A-Bear donation became the hook to elevate awareness of the business, which at present operates out of the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel at Westport. Highlighting the donation could help a lot more folks study about HavenHouse’s perform.

As the college students reveal in the social media friendly, 62-second movie they made as portion of their campaign, they weren’t just chroniclers of the story. They also served make it transpire.

“This started out with us having a brainstorm session in course,” Huggard explained. “Jill was speaking about how HavenHouse is working out of a lodge proper now, and it’s type of hard to make it really feel like dwelling. She requested us to consider, ‘What could we do?’”

Alexander puzzled if possibly someone experienced a get hold of at a nearby quilting club they could solicit to make quilts for site visitors, but Huggard swiftly commenced pondering a different concept.

Her father, Arthur Huggard, is the director of eCommerce at Build-A-Bear Workshop. She texted him to talk to if the organization ever had overstock it gifted to charitable organizations. Her father related her to Emily Fuhrman, who directs global charitable supplying for Build-A-Bear Workshop and Construct-A-Bear Basis national partnerships.

Fuhrman helps coordinate donations of tens of countless numbers of bears and other furry good friends each calendar year, and she jumped at the opportunity to enable a further St. Louis-based mostly firm. It just so happened the foundation experienced some bears and other animals – which include far more than 100 that had been vacation-themed – at its downtown headquarters for which Fuhrman and her colleagues experienced been hoping to obtain homes.

“One of the items that we genuinely love is that this was their project,” Fuhrman claimed of the college students. “Our aspect of this was just supplying the teddy bear hugs. The pupils have been the kinds who had the strategy, who had the inspiration, who were moved to lead.

“We actually want to shine a gentle on that. That is what helps make the environment go spherical. That is what moves us forward is the kindness and goodwill of the men and women.”

Huggard and some of her classmates, along with Alexander, organized to pick up the bears on Nov. 13 and delivered them to HavenHouse and its grateful government director, Paula Lowery.

“We were being first told it was likely to be a few hundred,” said Lowery, an UMSL alumna who earned an M.Ed. in counseling in 2008. “When Jill stated it was heading to be this substantial amount, certainly we were being thrilled, but we were being questioning where by we would place them. But the staff was like, ‘We’ll make a way.’”

HavenHouse has accessibility to a hospitality space at the DoubleTree wherever it gives attendees foods and other expert services, together with things they may want if they forgot one thing at dwelling. Lowery and her crew have stacked the bins of stuffed toys from floor to ceiling, and they also have them in bins in their office environment room, all set to give out when company check out in.

“Many of our households have zero suggests,” Lowery claimed. “They would never ever be able to just take their child to Make-A-Bear. It’s very distinctive for them to be equipped to wander away from a actually demanding problem with a medical center stay or go to and give their boy or girl something so neat.”

Stiegemeier, who like Huggard is graduating this weekend with his degree in interaction, was just one of the college students who designed the online video. He spliced jointly photographs and footage collected by his classmates when they picked up the bears and sent them to HavenHouse, and he arranged the visuals to tunes and additional text to guidebook viewers as a result of the story.

The video clip concludes with an picture of two sisters, who have been the 1st to acquire their furry friends during their remain at HavenHouse.

On Wednesday, Make-A-Bear Foundation shared the video and photographs from the pickup and shipping and delivery on its Instagram website page.

That was tangible evidence of the students’ achievements this semester as they considered by means of messaging and tactic to recognize and arrive at their ideal viewers as perfectly as learned to use the equipment in Adobe Inventive Suite.

“The program is designed to be a combination of everything they’ve figured out in excess of their school encounter,” Alexander explained. “I purposefully stepped back and tried using to let them generate the bus mainly because I’m not heading to be there to explain to them particularly what to do when they graduate.”

For Huggard, getting that genuine-entire world working experience has been invaluable.

“It’s surely an accomplishment,” she stated. “UMSL and my schooling have been excellent, but this is some thing I can issue to that I did when in faculty that extends over and above the college. To be equipped to be concerned in the local community is great, and it is incredibly validating.”

Stiegemeier echoed all those sentiments and was specially moved to be undertaking do the job on behalf of an firm serving other individuals.

“I really like the plan of building positive that persons who are doing charitable factors get what they need and get points that will assist them,” Stiegemeier explained. “Being a part of that is just an best.”

To view the online video on Instagram, simply click right here.

Shorter URL: https://blogs.umsl.edu/information/?p=87578