India has the world’s largest student population of which about 90 million don’t have access to quality education; almost 8 million have never even been inside a school.

‘The Open Door Project’ is an initiative with a powerful proposition and potential for huge social impact. By bringing attention to this important initiative and its potential to impact the future of disadvantaged students, important stakeholders in the education ecosystem were inspired to join the movement.

All this has been achieved at a time when the country is in midst of national elections and ‘soft’ news doesn’t get much space in media.

While India has millions of children that do not have access to quality education - education that can improve their life prospects, at the same time, India has over 350,000 private schools that have invested in infrastructure and teachers to cater to the more affluent sections of the population.

The PR brief was to sensitize media about the importance of ‘The Open Door Project’ as a pioneering initiative in the Indian education space.

Position it effectively as a movement that seeks to augment efforts to fix India’s broken education system.

All this could be achieved with one simple act – that of private schools opening their doors to these disadvantaged children – after school hours.

While India has some good private schools with great infrastructure, they wastefully sit idle once the schools shut after classes every afternoon. The idea was simply to open a door and provide access to the most underprivileged. ‘The Open Door Project’ was created when The Millennium World School opened its doors to underprivileged children after regular classes and devoted its own infrastructure, resources, and teachers. It also reached out to volunteers, activists and NGOs to be part of the movement with a short film and an on-ground activation. The outreach involved carrying the message through marginalized communities and neighborhoods to drive enrollments. What this one school has demonstrated is that the potential for transformation is huge. If the 350,000 odd private schools in India each take just 100 kids, we will have 30 million children getting access to quality education.

It is normally difficult to get share of voice for softer, human-interest stories in a ‘breaking-news’ oriented media. This idea was presented as a breakthrough project with an implementable basis – something that had proved itself and can be implemented by others as well. We brought the ‘good news’ potential to the interest of media – in a world torn by strife, a piece of simple feel-good, heart-warming news.

We networked support through multiple angles – NGOs from the education sector, stakeholders – all became pegs for stories from different standpoints. We used the elitist tag – threw the gauntlet to other private schools to follow the example – and made media an accomplice. This allowed us a free run with an otherwise blasé media, which tends to see this as boutique news. The result was that the story became a campaign - and more and more schools were compelled to consider partnerships of a similar kind. Stories were seeded around the launch film ‘Bhukkad’ that movingly portrayed an impoverished boy hungry for education. Important data was collated to present the criticality of the issue and the genius solution provided by ‘The Open Door Project’. Media attention was secured by holding a candle to the efforts by one such school.

We networked support through multiple angles – NGOs from the education sector, stakeholders – all became pegs for stories from different standpoints. We used the elitist tag – threw the gauntlet to other private schools to follow the example – and made media an accomplice. This allowed us a free run with an otherwise blasé media, which tends to see this as boutique news. The result was that the story became a campaign - and more and more schools were compelled to consider partnerships of a similar kind. Stories were seeded around the launch film ‘Bhukkad’ that movingly portrayed an impoverished boy hungry for education. Important data was collated to present the criticality of the issue and the genius solution provided by ‘The Open Door Project’. Media attention was secured by holding a candle to the efforts by one such school and by trying and making other schools see the power of the idea – so it could become a collective initiative by all private schools.