by Jacqueline Koch | May 16, 2017 |
By Janinne Brunyee
While listening to the speakers pitching their startups at the first ever Seattle Female Founders Alliance Founders Showcase last week, I had an important realization: I was much more captivated by the pitches that were framed by the speaker’s personal story. It wasn’t that these speakers had a better business idea or go-to-market strategy. It was just that I found myself leaning in a bit more, paying closer attention and emotionally investing in their success.
And that reminded me why I co-founded a firm that is committed to the art of storytelling. Each presenter had a specific call-to-action in mind: find an investor, attract high talent employees, drive sign-ups. The speakers I connected with understood what they needed to do to inspire action: unite an idea with an emotion. And the best way to do that is to tell a compelling story.
Here are a few of the stories told by female startup founders to a captive audience at The Riveter, the new co-working space in Capitol hill built by women, for women.
Give in Kind
The unexpected and unfathomable loss of a child was the seed that grew into Give in Kind. Founder and CEO, Laura Malcolm said even though she and her husband were living far away from their families and close friends, the outpouring of help was almost overwhelming. “The challenge was that because they didn’t live locally, our loved ones didn’t know that there were thousands of services near us that could give us exactly what we needed.” Instead, she said, they sent flowers and money – to the value of $8,000 – when what the couple really needed was house cleaning, childcare and meals.
Malcolm pointed out that whether it’s a cancer diagnosis or a sick child in hospital – everyone is touched at some point by personal hardship. That’s when Give in Kind comes in.
“We are working to make it easy to do everything that matters,” she said. “Give in Kind is a single solution platform that lets people lend a hand from anywhere.” The company calls it “crowd-caring.”
By partnering with service providers like Cleanify.com, Uber, Rover.com and Blue Apron, users can send the help that’s needed where it is needed. They can also set up registries of the items and services that will have the most impact.
Genneve
As a woman of “a certain age” Jill Angelo is on a mission to start a movement that will affect half the population: helping women navigate the big M: menopause. ‘Menopause is not often spoken about and when it is, it has a negative connotation,” said Angelo. “As a woman on my own perimenopausal journey, I realized that I have a passion for women’s health and development,” she said.
Research revealed that menopause can be life-changing for women who also happen to have a lot of spending power. “One in three women experience unpleasant effects and they are willing to spend $25B a year to get relief.”
Angelo looked at the solutions and providers that are typically available to women heading into menopause and midlife. “Typically, you go to a OBGYN. But, more OBGYN’s are retiring than are graduating,” she said. As a result, women in menopause are turning to other providers including nutritionists, physical therapists, urologists, endocrinologists etc. Angelo also found that most of the online resources were dated.
So, she decided to step up to create Genneve.com, a digital platform for women heading into menopause and midlife.
“It’s time to bring transparency to the market. We are disrupting the traditional word of mouth women use the build their network by connecting women directly with providers, community, content and products.”
Invio
In 1999 when everyone was worried about Y2K, Cassie Wallender first met Dema Poppa. Fast forward to 2015, Cassie was a senior manager of Product Design at IMS Health and Demo was running medical trials at Redmond-based Olympus. “Dema told me that this mainly involved collecting data and that he was frustrated by the quality of the data collection process,” said Wallender.
Why? The data was collected on site by doctors before being transcribed into a database for the trial. Then the data had to be verified by monitors to ensure that it was transcribed accurately. All this data was stored in large three-ringed binders.
Wallender says that each clinical trial required that monitors had to travel to each site every 3 to 4 weeks – resulting in thousands of trips. The problem was that even with third party verification, transcription errors were still happening. The pair discovered that each year, $6.8B is wasted on this process.
The breaking point came when the FDA changed its regulations to allow a new verification process. Wallender and Poppa decided to seize the opportunity to build the tool that Dema wished he had when he was running clinical trials – a tool that would finally eliminate all those three-ring binders.
Invio is a cloud-based platform for remote source document verification which reduces travel requirements by 70% and increases the verification process by 95%. “With Invio, the verification process goes from two months to two hours,” she said.
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We work collaboratively to discover, write and tell powerful stories that drive authentic engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | May 10, 2017 |
The story of how two women devised a grand plan to help level the playing field for women
We first met Amy Nelson at a workshop we hosted on messaging and storytelling at the end of last year. She told us about this crazy idea to start a co-working space for women. A few months later, she called to tell us that their crazy idea had grown a bit (a lot) and she was ready for us to help her develop The Riveter’s message in time for the launch of the first of 20 planned locations – in Seattle on May 1. This is their story.
The Riveter is founded in a story that women in the workplace know well. We’ve worked hard to break through arbitrary, man-made barriers to claim our seat at the table. In the end, we realized that there was only one way for our voices to be heard, to make a difference and to create the life we want. We had to build a brand new—fundamentally different—table.
That’s The Riveter: an inspired collaborative workspace built by women, for women.
We want to support women to take bigger risks: to write a business plan, to pitch a really smart idea, to raise her first round of venture funding, to launch a company. We’re an ally to every woman, anywhere, and wherever she may find herself in her career. We’ve created a community of support so she can start her second—or third—act. We offer a network of resources so she can come back from years at home raising her children or taking care of others. We are a source of expertise and empowerment so she can off-ramp from her corporate job and on-ramp to her next successful venture, as a freelancer, a small business owner or any role she chooses!
Women are no strangers to hard work and accomplishment. But we’ve paid the price with self-sacrifice and burnout. We’re changing that. Providing women with a great space to work isn’t about ping pong tables and beer kegs. It is about redefining the workplace guided by our fierce conviction that women are strongest when we take care of our minds and our bodies. The Riveter creates a new way to work, integrating wellness into our lives, simply and seamlessly. With yoga and meditation on site, just steps from your desk, we offer the space to breathe, stretch, pause and build self-care into each day.
Yes, we are equal, but we are not the same. And women deserve a place to define success on their own terms.
The Riveter is more than a collaborative workspace, it’s a movement. We aren’t celebrities, we are working mothers. We are not a club, we are a community and we are entrepreneurs in the broadest sense of the term. We own businesses and build brands. We give to good causes with our time, talent and treasure. We manage households and lead our nation’s youth. There is strength in numbers and to truly amplify our voices, we intend to share what we know and who we know. We welcome everyone, including men. We want all to have a place at our table: The Riveter.
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We work collaboratively to discover, create and tell powerful stories that driven authentic engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | Jul 20, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
As the publishing industry continues to face the impact of the unstoppable digital transformation, one organization has found a formula for success that allows them to pursue their passion for long-form narrative content.
Brooklyn-based Atavist is in fact two companies in one. The first is The Atavist Magazine, an eight-time finalist for the National Magazine Awards and the first digital-only magazine to win for feature writing. The second is the Atavist self-publishing platform. This enables creative individuals and organizations to produce beautiful and shareable stories, attract new audiences and build business around their work—all without knowing a line of code.
Together with Nicholas Thompson, a Senior Editor at The New Yorker and Jefferson Rabb, Atavist’s CTO, co-founder Evan Ratliff put his experience at National Geographic, Wired Magazine and The New Yorker to work to sketch out a new approach to long-form narrative content that is based on an innovative take on design and storytelling. The result: The Atavist Magazine.
Design + Storytelling
“Each story is a creation of its own and is meant to be an experience. We have pioneered this form of long-form content where each story includes video, GIFs and big imagery.”
The magazine covers topics of general interest ranging from “Zombie King”, Emily Matchar’s exploration of author William Seabrook who introduced the zombie cadaver—the walking dead—to the American imagination before sinking into obscurity to “Whatsoever Things Are True”, the result of Matthew Shaer’s ten-month long investigation into the aftermath of a crime that happened 39 years ago in Chicago.
The team publishes one story each month, attracting between 10,000 and 20,000 readers. “We are known for long stories that are hard to do and that is why we have won awards and have been nominated for Emmys for our video-based work,” Ratliff said.
Advertising free zone
The magazine does not carry advertising and according to Ratliff, this is the reason that their stories enjoy higher than average reader engagement. “If you tell an engaging story, people will read it on their phones and their laptops. Everything does not have to be shorter and faster,” he said.
“We have stories pitched to us or we will go and find them. Either way, we spend months with the writer to make sure they can get inside the story.” Ratliff says sometimes there are stories that the team just wants to do – especially international stories. “It is a very purpose-driven organization. Even so, we have to lure our readers in and our stories have to feel like movies,” he said.
Earlier this year, The Atavist Magazine carried a serialized story about an international drug dealer which was the result of two years of investigation. Penned by Ratliff with help from Aurora Almendral and Natalie Lampert, “The Mastermind” chronicles the story of Paul Calder Le Roux, an international crime kingpin turned government informant who was apprehended in Liberia in 2012 after a six-year investigation by DEA agents. “The Mastermind” was released shortly after Le Roux’s dramatic appearance in a Minneapolis courtroom on March 2, 2016.
“This time, we released this story in serialized form with one installment released each week.” Ratliff says it took a week to produce each installment. “We are much more akin to a production company in some ways—but we meet a monthly deadline,” he said.
A self-publishing platform for long-form narrative content
What makes this magazine possible without having to turn a profit is the income generated by the Atavist self-publishing content platform.
Ratliff said that the impetus for creating a publishing platform was born out of the absence of commercially available solutions capable of producing the kind of rich experience the team wanted to deliver. “When we launched, there wasn’t software that would allow us to do the type of design we wanted to do. So, we built a CMS and started selling it to others.”
In essence, the Atavist platform allows someone who is not a designer to create something that looks professionally designed. This includes easily adding multimedia to projects by dragging and dropping blocks of video, sound, slideshows, charts, maps and Instagram and Soundcloud embeds to really show the whole story.
Today, a number of organizations are using the platform for a variety of reasons. United Airlines, for example is using it to build and publish Hemispheres, the online version of their inflight magazine. Stanford University’s Engineering school is using it to create a magazine-like version of their prospectus.
“Our clients are often at the intersection of journalism and activism,” said Ratliff. Most clients are using it for long-form content, whether that is for corporate reports or journalism.
Revenue model for long-form narrative content
As far as the business model is concerned, The Atavist Magazine is available via a subscription. A metered paywall allows readers to access three stories for free before a subscription is needed to gain more content. “We option a lot of our stories for movies, which provides another revenue stream,” said Ratliff.
And finally, there is the software platform that provides the main funding for the magazine. The Atavist self-publishing platform offers a variety of paid subscription options ranging from $8 a month, for small users, to $250 per month for larger organizations.
The idea of a self-funding magazine supplemented by its own publishing software is one innovative way that publishers can support their passions for narrative journalism while not being reliant on traditional ad revenues to succeed.
Atavist is one of the companies that participants of the 2016 VDZ Akademie Digital Publisher’s Tour visited in New York City this June. The Tour was co-organized by Boost! Collective.
Boost! Collective is a strategic messaging and story-driven communications firm. We help clients discover, write and tell powerful stories which drive engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | May 9, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
What happens when 16 executives from traditional European publishing companies converge in California to visit companies at the forefront of media transformation? Intellectual alchemy.
This is what Boost! had the privilege to witness as co-organizers of the FIPP/VDZ 2016 Digital Innovators’ West Coast Tour. It was apparent in the animated conversations between tour participants on the bus between visits and in the deep engagement with tour hosts on a wide range of topics including the best approaches for reaching millennials, whether traditional publishing is truly dead and many more.
As Innovation Tour organizers, we worked with well-known German media innovation journalist, Ulrike Langer to set up the tour program. Over many months, we agonized over who the best organizations are in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles to help tour participants write the story of their digital future. And to ensure that bodies as well as minds were properly fed, we curated a set of restaurants that best represent modern California cuisine.
Innovation Tours are part of Boost!’s practice to help organizations facing disruptive change write their future storyline.
Innovation Tour program
Here is an overview of the tour:
DAY 1: SAN FRANCISCO
- RocketSpace is the ultimate technology campus for entrepreneurs, startups and corporate innovation professionals.
- LinkedIn, a professional networking site, allows its members to create business connections, search for jobs, and find potential clients.
- Bloomberg Beta is an early-stage fund, backed by Bloomberg L.P.
- Optimizely is the world’s leading experience optimization platform, providing website and mobile A/B testing and personalization.
- Tout helps publishers, content creators and advertisers generate more online video revenue.
- Contextly makes high-quality editorial tools for news sites and other publications
- Storied brings the native app experience to the mobile web.
- Jaunt’s technology provides an end-to-end solution for creating cinematic VR experiences.
- Buzzfeed’s Open Lab explores new ways of telling stories through hardware and software.
Food highlight: Dinner at the Slanted Door at the Ferry Terminal Market.
DAY 2: SAN FRANCISCO/SILICON VALLEY
- Stackla is the content marketing platform that puts user-generated content at the heart of marketing.
- Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is improving the mobile web and enhancing the distribution ecosystem.
- The Brown Institute for Media Innovation provides grants for research and development for both the fields of journalism and technology.
- Known on campus as the d.school, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford works to develop innovative, human-centered solutions to real-world challenges.
Food highlight: Family style lunch at Tamerine in Palo Alto
DAY 3: SAN FRANCISCO/LOS ANGELES
- DistroScale is a platform + marketplace for delivering, managing, & measuring native content across websites, mobile web & apps.
- Hello Giggles publishes articles by young women under 18, and maintains a vibrant monthly youthful readership.
Food highlight: Dinner at Gracias Madre – known for delicious vegan Mexican fare.
DAY FOUR: LOS ANGELES
- Venture capital firm CrossCut Ventures which recently added $75 million to its fund, has 45 companies in its portfolio and 10 exits to date.
- Addressing the youth market, Awesomenesstv is a multi-channel network with 90,000 YouTube channels and over 3,300,000 subscribers.
- Meredith Xcelerated Marketing is the leading Content Marketing Agency for today’s hyper-connected world.
Food highlight: Delicious and fresh family style lunch at Rose Café in Venice
DAY FIVE: LOS ANGELES
- Digital native Tastemade, is a food and travel video network for the mobile generation.
Food highlight: Breakfast provided by Tastemade talent Bondi Harvest Café.
Facilitating deep and meaningful engagement
As we discovered first hand, an innovation tour offers participants an unprecedented opportunity to get up close and personal with the organizations who are driving innovation and transformation. Also the opportunity to share and learn from fellow tour participants who are facing or who have faced the same challenges is extremely valuable.
Next Innovation Tour
VDZ Akademie Digital Publishers’ Tour to New York City and Chicago – June 13 – 17, 2016. Limited seats are still available. Sign up today.
Contact us
Contact us if your organization is looking to create a powerful learning experience for key executives and managers. We will develop a program of company visits, manage all tour logistics and manage the day to day tour operations.
by Jacqueline Koch | May 2, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
It was a long and winding road that brought Stackla co-founders Robb Miller, Peter Cassidy and Damien Mahoney from Sydney, Australia to an office in San Francisco which is where participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour met Peter yesterday.
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It all began when Cassidy was working for the digital rights holder to the National Rugby league and Miller was working for the League itself. All three founders had a keen appreciation for the challenges organisations face around content and to use content to engage fans.
After winning a services contract to create content for the rugby league, the trio teamed up to start an agency. “We were creating 40 long form articles a day and many videos and we quickly realised the more effort and time we put into content creation, the less traction it got. In fact, long form pieces got less engagement that short videos,” Cassidy told Tour participants.
“We wondered what would happen if we flipped the model around and instead of competing with the content on social networks, the answer was to embrace it instead,” he said. This led to the idea to create technology that enables publishers and brands to collect existing user-generated content and use it as a powerful source of information. And that was when Stackla was born.
“We pitched the idea to an Australian broadcaster who had the rights to the Tour de France and were surprised when they said they would buy it,” he said. The new company then quickly pulled a prototype together and launched the company in time for the 2012 Tour de France in 2012 to great success for the broadcaster.
On the basis of this early validation, a new engineering team was assembled in Sydney who started to build the technology platform. The next year, the company set up an office in London and a year or so later, the founders moved to San Francisco to set up the US operations.
Stackla: The problem of fragmented content
According to Cassidy, the team saw that content marketing was becoming increasingly important to brands and after being approached by agencies to help them with brand content, Stackla expanded their focus beyond publishers to include brands.
“What we were seeing is that publishers and brands are creating content and then using social media as a distribution channel. At the same time, organic reach is diminishing which means that today, you really have to pay-to-play.” But the key question remained: Is this driving the right people to the right destination at the right ROI?
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by Jacqueline Koch | May 2, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
How do medium-sized publishers take advantage of revenue opportunities offered by online video without taking on the prohibitive costs associated with building out their own video production capabilities? This is the problem that four-year old San Francisco startup, Tout, set out to solve.
Participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour got a first-hand account of how Tout is changing online video distribution from CEO and founder, Michael Downing.
Downing pointed out that many publishers are having a hard time making the transition from a print paradigm to more of a television paradigm. That is because today, 125 websites are driving 95 per cent of the US$9bn of revenue that online video is generating. “We are trying to democratise continent distribution by providing technology, content and expertise to allow a larger group of publishers to participate in the online video revenue opportunity,” he said.
Tout: How does it work?
Tout works with large video content publishers like television stations who need to find new ways to distribute their content beyond their own web properties. “For large content creators, online advertising is the largest source of digital revenue but they have run out of space to carry more ads. Syndication is important for continued growth,’ he said.
Then Tout works with mid-tier publishers who do not have the in-house capabilities to create their own video content. These publishers make all the articles they publish available to the Tout platform where the text is scanned. The platform then identifies which videos are relevant for each targeted article and the video is seamlessly integrated into the story.
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