Credit: Photo by Ser Baffo/ABC

by Chelsea Dade

I’ll admit, I was actually late to the Abbott Elementary train. But I’ve been a fan of Quinta since her days on Buzzfeed! (where my Millennials at?) While the show has been on since last year, I watched the entire kickoff season the weekend of Feb 26th. And I couldn’t stop laughing. In my past life, I worked as a program facilitator in Chicago Public Schools, and the opening point about the importance of rugs in kids’ classrooms immediately stood out. Colorful rugs in classrooms make the learning spaces less cold and more inviting, and yes, the kids will nap on their own occasions. But they are really important, and it was such a creative and accurate way to start a show about the complexity and inequity of the American school system.

If you didn’t know, Abbott Elementary is a TV show about a group of teachers who work at Abbot Elementary, an under-resourced, predominately Black elementary school in Philadelphia. It just wrapped its first season and received national acclaim for its wit, humor, and realism. (And has just been renewed for Season 2!)

In early March, it was announced by the show’s Creator Quinta Brunson that they would put their marketing budget for the show toward buying school supplies for the teachers. Brunson has a special connection to educators, as she witnessed her mother work for 40 years as a teacher.

In a move we rarely see in the world of “look at me” marketing and communications, Brunson and her team showed the importance of knowing your audience and prioritizing them first. Abbott Elementary could have used the money to continue promoting their show through various TV and digital platforms and paid ad placements, but instead, they brought it back to the community they wanted to highlight, teachers.

Now, bringing this back to communications. There are media and communications organizations that make donations to a community-based organization, typically during the holidays and for taxable purposes. But it is certainly not a common practice year-round.

So I ask…what if more communications firms worked with community-based organizations to prioritize their billions of marketing dollars into tangible resources that communities need rather than prioritize marketing? What if instead of indirectly marketing healthcare resources we worked harder to connect the people directly to those resources? Quinta is working with Scholastic to provide diverse books to elementary students: why can’t health communication firms repurpose their marketing budgets to provide tangible health education resources to communities they work with? Where would that take us?

It’s worth considering…