AOLers Kick Off Their Shoes for TOMS

AOL employees across the country kicked off their shoes on April 16th in support of TOMS One Day Without Shoes (ODWS), a day to raise global awareness of the impact a pair of shoes can have on a child’s life by taking off our own. For the past two years, AOL employees rallied around this day by going #withoutshoes, and this year was no different.

Leading up to ODWS, both employees and consumers were encouraged to pledge to go barefoot on April 16 by joining our team (AOL & The Huffington Post) in the Barefoot Challenge on OneDayWithoutShoes.com, and I’m pleased to say our team came in third place! On April 16, a majority of the AOL offices across the country participated by holding various barefoot activities -- some included pedicure stations, breakfast bars provided by KIND, barefoot photobooths, barefoot twister, computer stations for employees to upload pictures and spread their ODWS message to their social networks, and, of course, a shoe drive for employees to donate shoes to those in need.

In addition to engaging and educating our employees around TOMS ODWS, we also educated our audience via content and pro bono media across AOL and The Huffington Post. Leading up to ODWS, the Cause of the Day module on the AOL homepage and the AOL Mail sign-in screen were leveraged to generate awareness and drive users to OneDayWithoutShoes.com to learn more about the day. On ODWS, both Blake Mycoskie, Founder and Chief Shoe Giver of TOMS, and Arianna Huffington added their voices by blogging on Huffington Post (part of a larger ODWS blog series on HuffPost). Read the blog posts by Blake and Arianna.