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The United Negro College Fund is the nation’s oldest and biggest advocate of Black higher education.
We are honored to work with the UNCF’s Institute for Capacity Building to further the outsized impact of the nation’s 102 Historically Black Colleges and Universities and 64 Primarily Black Institutions.
From assisting with program design to developing a new website and preparing fundraising pitches, we’ve become a trusted partner in propelling student success, community advancement and the fight for racial-justice equity despite historic and ongoing underfunding and marginalization of Black colleges and universities.
We’ve led intensive media tours, providing compelling photography, interview and campus footage of more than 20 Black colleges and universities. We’ve also played an instrumental role in growing and amplifying their annual gathering of Black higher education. After we helped rebrand this conference to UNITE, both attendance and sponsorship more than tripled.
UNCF has also tapped us for many other projects, including supporting the strategic communications of the HBCU Transformation Project funded by Blue Meridian Partners and the promotion of Target Scholars. We’ve also helped prepare several pitches, including the one for HBCUv (an innovative virtual learning platform that brings the best of Black higher education online), as well as reports, including the latest on the mental health of Black college students.
• Strategy & Research
• Branding, Messaging & Design
• Multimedia Production
• Website Development
• Social Media
• Fundraising
Right2ReadPhilly—an early-literacy campaign designed by and for Philly families, guided by an advisory council of community leaders and funded by the William Penn Foundation—reached over 100,000 families during its summer 2024 pilot.
Mighty Engine, seen as a go-to agency for early-literacy priorities for the past ten years, served as the lead organizer, securing partnerships with two brilliant education activists to leverage under-recognized, undertapped, under-studied and under-shared strategies of marginalized communities of which many Philly families are a part.
With Sara Novic, a best-selling novelist and an instructor in deaf studies, we developed Simple Signs, First Words in American Sign Language. Confirming our hunches of the benefits of Simple Signs, the American Academy of Pediatrics now promotes early exposure to sign language as a means to improve development for all children.
With Sharif El-Mekki, the CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, we brought back the Freedom Schools Alphabet Song based in Black pedagogy. Just in time as the Philly schools make a historic shift back to the science-of-reading, phonics-based teaching approach.
We are seeking support to expand our reach with the Right2ReadPhilly FAMILY WONDER SERIES, delivering playing-and-learning-together experiences to more than 1,000 families, in partnership with organizations committed to our children’s right to read and life success.
• Strategy & Research
• Branding, Messaging & Design
• Multimedia Production
• Website Development
• Social Media
• Fundraising
We have worked extensively with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health on a series of successful public education campaigns: encouraging 30 minutes of joyful movement into everyday routines; promoting smoking cessation; designing developmentally-appropriate early-literacy products; creating compelling violence-prevention messaging with and for young people; and spotlighting neighborhood produce trucks.
For the smoke cessation If I Can Quit, So Can You Campaign, we feature real Philadelphians from “high-risk” groups (those in recovery, pregnant women and young moms, frontline workers, LGBTQIA+, Latinos and veterans) who share their quit story.
To encourage more physical activity, through Philly Powered, we presented stories of fellow Philadelphians who overcame a wide range of fitness challenges to show how fitness can be accessible to all, regardless of age, income or body type. The campaign’s website was the most visited health-related city site, earning multiple awards.
Philly Loves Fresh features seven produce trucks in West and Southwest Philly, encouraging residents to stop by for fresh fruits and vegetables at affordable prices. Each product truck owner saw sizable increases in business during our campaign.
• Strategy & Research
• Branding, Messaging & Design
• Multimedia Production
• Website Development
• Social Media
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For nearly a decade, we have served as the strategic communications partner of the Center for Black Educator Development whose mission is to rebuild the national Black teacher pipeline so that our nation’s corps of educators reflects the diversity of our nation’s students, better positioning all students to achieve in school.
From creating branding assets and overseeing the directing and production of multimedia to developing annual reports, fundraising materials and editorial contributions and promoting the youth-driven #WeNeedBlackTeachers campaign, Mighty Engine has been there from the beginning.
During BMEC2024, it was especially moving to see young people we first met as high schoolers now take the stage as teachers, living up to what it means when CBED’s founder and CEO Sharif El-Mekki says, “The purest form of activism is teaching Black children superbly well.”
• Strategy & Research
• Branding, Messaging & Design
• Multimedia Production
• Website Development
• Social Media
• Fundraising
We are the creative agency behind this novel trauma-healing campaign, developed in partnership with Dr. Ted Corbin and MacArthur Foundation genius grantee Dr. John Rich (both former founders of Drexel University’s Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice), and a coalition of young survivors and witnesses of violence and community activists.
From the beginning, the goal was to see how we could leverage strategic communications—from branding and digital platforms to social media and community events—to promote trauma healing and educate the public about its importance in reducing violence, retaliation and re-injury among our youth.
It was clear from the beginning that meant we had to transform the conversation about violence away from one that is based in personal shaming toward one that is based in healing.
The focus of the campaign that emerged from this process was to promote the idea that healing from trauma—including from crime and violence—is possible by voicing messages of hope and healing in the victims of trauma. Their collective healing stories encourage more healing and, in doing so, blur the lines between healer and healed, also exponentially increasing the ways one can heal from trauma.
We are now working with partners in Atlanta and Chicago to bring the campaign to other high-need urban areas, while keeping each community’s unique focus.
• Strategy & Research
• Branding, Messaging & Design
• Multimedia Production
• Website Development
• Social Media
• Fundraising
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The homeownership gap between Black and white Philadelphians persists, according to recent research by both the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Zillow.
Their findings suggest this gap is the result of systemic roadblocks that go beyond income. For example, lenders tend to deny more Black applicants seeking mortgage loans, and Black families tend to have less access to generational wealth—mainly due to the persistent racial homeownership gap.
To confront this confounding issue, a coalition of organizations including the Urban League of Philadelphia, HACE, New Kensington CDC, Congreso de Latinos Unidos and the Urban Affairs Coalition came together to form Philly5000, with support from Wells Fargo.
Working with new Philly homeowners and housing counselors, Mighty Engine develop branding, a website and social-media content for Philly5000 that welcomed and encouraged lower-income Black and Brown families to homeownership, providing them with the information they need to assess their readiness for homeownership and to connect them to special programs, deals and a neighborhood housing counselor.
As a result of our work, Philly5000 was able to meet their recruitment goals.
• Strategy & Research
• Branding, Messaging & Design
• Multimedia Production
• Website Development
• Social Media
In Southeast Asia, men attend college at nearly three times the rate of women even as international experts prioritize supporting women through higher education and entrepreneurship as proven means to socio-economic development.
Harpswell, U.S.-based nonprofit, sees promoting the next generation of women leaders as the most powerful force for positive social change in Southeast Asia and key to the region’s future
They operate two first-of-their-kind residential leadership centers for young women attending university in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as well as a two-week leadership training summit in Malaysia for young professional women from the ten ASEAN countries across Southeast Asia and Nepal.
The majority of the young women in their programs report graduating at the top-ten percent of their university class and two-thirds receiving competitive scholarships.
We helped them develop a comprehensive new brand that better reflects the organization and the women they serve, applying these concepts and messaging to the creation of new materials and their website. They’ve been able to use the new assets to secure more partners and sponsors.
Harpswell was founded by Alan Lightman, an American writer, scientist and social entrepreneur.
• Strategy & Research
• Branding, Messaging & Design
• Multimedia Production
• Website Development
• Fundraising
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With a new leader at the helm in 2021, United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey asked Mighty Engine to support a rebranding and website-development effort that would reflect their shift in strategic focus to prioritize poverty-fighting efforts and related programming.
This renewed focus came as Philadelphia was recognized (and is still recognized) as the nation’s poorest big city, with a poverty rate that hovers around a quarter of the population.
Our responsibilities also included working closely with United Way program staff to develop and present a new messaging plan focused on ending intergenerational poverty.
• Strategy & Research
• Branding, Messaging & Design
• Multimedia Production
• Website Development
