5.17.2007 - 04:05pm ET

(CSRwire) NEW YORK, NY -- May 17, 2007 – Pearson and Jumpstart were honored today with a Cause Marketing Halo Award, America's highest honor for companies and causes that do well by doing good. Cause marketing is the strategy of building mutually beneficial alliances between companies and causes.

Jumpstart's Read for the Record campaign received the prestigious award for the Best Joint Message Program at the fifth annual Cause Marketing Forum conference. Jumpstart's Read for the Record is a national campaign to encourage hundreds of thousands of children and adults to read the same book on the same day. The inaugural campaign, for which this award was presented, took place on August 24, 2006, when more than 150,000 children participated with adults across 47 states.

This expansive shared reading experience – the culmination of the campaign – raises public awareness about the early education gap that exists between income levels. It also helps to raise funds to support Jumpstart – a national nonprofit organization that engages preschool children from low-income communities in an intensive early education program to improve their cognitive and emotional development, ensuring they enter kindergarten prepared to succeed at grade level. Since 1993, thousands of Jumpstart college-aged mentors have helped more than 50,000 children from low-income communities around the country enter school ready to learn. Pearson has been one of Jumpstart's national corporate partners since 2001.

"Jumpstart's Read for the Record couldn't have happened without the efforts of thousands of people across the country – people like those from Pearson who worked for months to organize events in their local communities," said Jumpstart CEO, George Askew. "Pearson underwrote the custom edition campaign book, the sale of which raised significant funds for our organization and now lives as a reminder of Jumpstart in tens of thousands of homes. Pearson businesses really helped mobilize people across the nation to participate in this campaign, and more than 1,500 people from 40 different Pearson offices helped set the record on August 24th."

"Reading is at the core of everything we do at Pearson, so we are thrilled with the response to this initiative to bring awareness to early education," said Mark Nieker, President of the Pearson Foundation. "Jumpstart's Read for the Record is the first time we have had a company-wide initiative of this magnitude. Pearson people everywhere have been eager to do all we can to bring national attention to this issue. Getting folks involved across the country is a big stride toward remedying the entirely solvable problem of so many children being unprepared for school."

"The Cause Marketing Halo Awards demonstrate the good that can be done when businesses and nonprofits team up," said David Hessekiel, president of Cause Marketing Forum, Inc., the program’s organizer. "It's a competition in which we all win."

"In 1990 cause marketing spending was a bit more than $100 million – this year it is forecast to top $1.4 billion,” Hessekiel continued. CMFI produces an annual conference, workshops, teleclasses and causemarketingforum.com, a website offering free resources to businesses and nonprofits interested in developing such programs.

A complete list of this year’s Cause Marketing Halo Award winners will be available at www.causemarketingforum.com/awards.asp on May 18 or by contacting info@causemarketingforum.com

About JUMPSTART

Jumpstart is a national nonprofit organization that engages preschool children from low-income communities in an intensive early education program to improve their cognitive and emotional development, ensuring they enter kindergarten prepared to succeed at grade level. Jumpstart’s foundation is its research-backed curriculum, active learning approach, and one-to-one adult-child interaction. Jumpstart trains adult mentors, primarily college students, to work in exclusive yearlong relationships with the children. By providing the children with undivided attention, reading with them, and working with them on academic and social skills, Jumpstart mentors increase children’s vocabularies, enhance their ability to read and learn, and improve the quality of their social interactions by the time they enter kindergarten. In 2005-2006, children who participated in Jumpstart programs increased their literacy, language, and social skills by 26 percent. Since 1993, thousands of Jumpstart mentors have helped more than 50,000 children from low-income communities around the country enter school ready to learn at grade level. Jumpstart has earned a four-star rating from Charity Navigator and is the recipient of the Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Award (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007) and the Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy’s Directors Award. For more information about Jumpstart, visit www.jstart.org.

About PEARSON

Pearson plc (NYSE: PSO) is an international media company. Its major business operations are: The Financial Times Group, which has an international network of business and financial newspapers and online services that are read by millions of business executives and investors every day; Pearson Education, the world's leading education business, which helps teachers teach and students learn at every stage and in every part of the world; and Penguin Group, which is one of the pre-eminent names in consumer publishing, with an unrivalled range of fiction and non-fiction, bestsellers, and classic titles.

Jumpstart and the Pearson businesses share a passion for education and inspiring people to reach their full potential. These shared goals and values led Jumpstart and Pearson to create the Pearson Teacher Fellowship in 2001. Each year, the Pearson Teacher Fellowship provides the opportunity for a select group of achievement-oriented college graduates to enter the early education field by becoming preschool teachers in Head Start and other early learning centers serving at-risk children. For more information go to www.pearsonfoundation.org.

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