Page 82 - AdNews Magazine Nov-Dec 2020

The Profile
Jason and Jasmine Maggs on their wedding day
Jase’s genuine passion for making positive change is incredible – it has inspired many of
his colleagues to find more purpose and reward in their careers by using their skills for good. The future is much brighter with leaders such as Jason rising to take the helm.
Melissa Fein, CEO, Initiative Australia
Experience (AIME), an organisation that aims to eliminate educational inequality for marginalised children. Bancroft had been trying to launch the mentoring program in the US for a few years.
A scheduled 20-minute meeting between Maggs and Bancroft stretched into six hours, with Maggs pitching the idea of bringing potential US mentors to Australia so they could learn from current Indigenous AIME mentors and help marginalised children in the states.
“Jack is just one of those amazing, brilliant people who jumps at any opportunity,” says Maggs. “He can see the world's possibilities and believes he can achieve them. He started calling people, and I'm like, ‘Who the hell is he calling?’
“He was trying to call Richard Branson’s people. Fast-forward about a week and a half and we have a plane.
“So we have this plane taking off from Los Angeles to Sydney and that's when I kind of shit myself because we had a plane, we had zero media budget and there was just the two of us who were going to be on the entire plane.”
Calling in favours, the pair raised about $1.3 million in free media, produced an ad voiced by the cast of Orange is the New Black, built the registration website and finally, after six months of Maggs working on top of his role at Initiative, they sat down on launch day to watch applications roll in.
Just two applications were submitted.
“We tried our hardest,” he says. “We did everything we thought would work. Jack called me, he was sitting on the steps out the front of his place and I was in my apartment in Lower East Side [New York] and both of us were nearly in tears because we didn't know what to do.
“We had spent all our money, we had an empty plane that was going to take off. We went back to the drawing board — this was a great lesson for me in doing good — and realised what might work for a big spending client, doesn't necessarily work for a not-for-profit. You have to go back to the roots of what makes that organisation that organisation.”
Instead, the pair created the Hooded Hustle campaign which focused on one-on-one connections. As part of this, they flew about 20 AIME mentors from Australia to the US who drove from university to university and introduced the program to young people. This approach resulted in more than 3500 applications being submitted and the donated Virgin Australia plane was filled with 240 young people flying to Sydney for the AIME Mentoring program.
From this campaign, Maggs was given the role of global head of good at Initiative, allowing him to divide his time evenly as a strategist and doing good. Other programs Maggs has worked on include Citizen Reef with Ladbible, calling on the Great Barrier Reef to be granted Australian citizenship so it has the same rights and protections as every other Australian citizen. He also works with Johns Hopkins University each year to help families with kids with congenital heart disease, and Gotcha4Life, a preventative mental health organisation working on mental fitness.
Next on his list, Maggs would like to focus on the environment, but ultimately he would like his role as head of good to become redundant. “Doing good should be a core function of everyone's role,” he says.
“Hopefully one day we don't need a department dedicated to doing good, and that it's a democratised role where doing good is just part of every day.
“I've got a firm belief that if we all just did what we're really, really good at for those who need it the most, we'd be in a much better place in society.
“Many of us wake up every single day with that sick feeling in our stomach because the world isn't exactly how we want to see it.
“Truth of the matter is, there is no change fairy who will turn up and create that change. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world so be restless, relentless and radical in your approach to changing the world because each and every one of us has the power to do it.”