Ryan Seacrest Foundation: Flashback with Coca-Cola: The Coca-Cola Company

For as long as we can remember, we have been a Coca-Cola family. Maybe it is because we are from Atlanta or maybe because family dinners are a Seacrest tradition, but Coca-Cola has always had a presence in our house and even in our Christmas Cards.

Being a family of traditions, it only seems fitting that many years later, including a move across the country (Meredith and Ryan now live in Los Angeles,) Coca-Cola is still a part of our lives. It was, in fact, a meal around the dinner table that led to a brainstorming about how Ryan and our family could give back and ultimately led to a partnership with Coca-Cola.

Over the years, Ryan has visited numerous children’s hospitals. He was always so touched by his experiences with the patients and wanted to create something that had a lasting impact for the hospital community.

The brainstorm over dinner led to many (many) more conversations and ended with the creation of the Ryan Seacrest Foundation.

The Ryan Seacrest Foundation is dedicated to inspiring today’s youth through entertainment and education focused initiatives. The first initiative is to build broadcast media centers, named Seacrest Studios, within pediatric hospitals. Our aim is to contribute positively to the healing process for children and their families during their stay by developing these centers to bring an uplifting spirit to the hospital community. We believe access to multimedia experiences will bring patients exciting and stimulating adventures to encourage optimistic thoughts during treatment.

When we initially took on this project, we are the first to admit, we were learning as we went along. We had a clear vision of what we wanted to build and understood the potential it had, but had never done anything like this before.

Ryan has always had a special relationship with Coca-Cola throughout his career, so it seemed only fitting that we reached out to the Company, not only for their support, but also, guidance. We were thrilled when we were given the opportunity to explain what we were looking to accomplish.

From that moment on we like to say that the Coca-Cola family adopted ours. We were set up with the Company’s community marketing team and quickly learned all about creating meaningful and lasting guiding principles. We then moved on to marketing strategy, so we could come up with an image and brand identity that really represented our vision and mission. All in all, Coca-Cola truly invested in the future of the Ryan Seacrest Foundation in more ways than one.

It is important to us to work with partners that truly believe in what we are doing as much as we do. We found that in Coca-Cola. Since day one, the Company has been there for us, and continues to be there three years later.

Since 2010, our foundation has now built Seacrest Studios at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Children’s Medical Center in Dallas and Children’s Hospital of Orange County. We have plans to build at Levine Children’s Hospital in Charlotte, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital within 2013-14. We will have even more hospital partnerships to announce soon.

To sum it all up, it is because of Coca-Cola and its continued support that we are able to not only do something we love every day, but do it together, much like our family dinners.

Thanks for helping spread happiness,

The Seacrests