It all started when Mr. Greene, our lecturer of the Digital Marketing course, gave us this wonderful opportunity to run the Metropolia Charity campaign as part of our campaign project for this course. Our aim for this project was to raise funds to be able to purchase Christmas gifts for the children in need in Finland and donate it to charity.

History of the Metropolia Charity

The Metropolia Charity has been around since 2010 and is one of the campaign projects of the Digital Marketing course led by Mr. Greene. Some years ago, former students helped develop this Metropolia Charity group by creating the Facebook page for the Metropolia Charity and then they organized a charity campaign with Red Cross. The plan for this year was to follow previous years process by organizing a charity campaign at Christmas and will be coordinated with Joulupuu.

Metropolia Charity Team 2016 Members

The Metropolia Charity 2016 team consists of six international students: 3 full-time IBL15_A Metropolia students, 1 student from Open University of Applied Sciences (in Metropolia) and 1 exchange student studying BBA at a university in Italy.

Charity Campaign

Running the charity campaign was quite a challenge for us as it was around the time when we were very busy doing group projects, individual assignments and upcoming exams we had to study for but somehow we managed to spare some time to run the campaign. We decided to have the food sale on December 12th, as it was the only day that we were available to come together as a group and run the charity campaign. On the 12th of December, we officially opened our food sale at the B- building of Metropolia Myyrmäki campus. We were selling empanadas, ham sandwiches, vegetarian focaccia pizza, carrot cakes, apple pies, banana muffins, juices, & coffee. We offered the Virtual Reality games experience for a reasonable price and aside from that, we gave our customers a chance to win the raffle prize, which is a gift basket full of goodies for every purchase. The winner of the prize was randomly chosen through the online random name picker website where we added all the purchasers’ names.

The Outcome

We have not been able to sell all the foods but we managed to cover all the expenses incurred for buying the food ingredients and at the same time we raised enough money to purchase a total of 17 toys to donate as Christmas gifts to the children in need. We dropped off the Christmas gifts on the 21^st of December 2016 to the Helsinki City Child Welfare Social Services located in Kaupintie 11 A (Pohjois-Haaga/Lassila) as part of the Joulupuu initiative.

We were grateful enough that in spite of the busy schedule of the students and lecturers/staff, they took time to participate and help us raise the funds. We would like to say thank you to all the people who helped make our charity campaign possible. Because of their help and participation, the children will receive their gifts this Christmas.

To also see what kind of events Metropolia Charity will arrange in the future, you can follow the Metropolia Charity Facebook page

Text and pictures by Sheila Surban & Metropolia Charity Team 2016