by Jacqueline Koch | Nov 23, 2017 |
“WE THE PEOPLE: ARE GREATER THAN FEAR.” Artist Shephard Fairey adapted a photo by Ridwan Adhami to create a triptych of the post-Trump era.
By Jacqueline Koch, Co-Founder, Partner – Boost! Collective
We’ve hit the one-year mark since the 2016 election. The 2017 election results offer a glimmer of hope. Last month at the 2017 Seattle Interactive Conference, National Geographic photographer Aaron Huey, founder of the Amplifier Foundation, recounted his shift from a traditional media platform to art. He outlined the role of artists as storytellers in major cultural movements and the power of language as a unifier between “red” and “blue.”
It’s a compelling premise: Art as a tremendous story-accelerant in fueling a cultural or social justice movement. Yet the photojournalist in me buckled. Art? What about the power of images and photo documentary work?
Here is where I’m coming from. When I picked up a camera for a career path, it was with the conviction that images have the power to change the world. Look at the giants of photojournalism who shaped our understanding of history—from Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith and Eddie Adams to James Nachtwey, Nick Ut and Mary Ellen Mark, just to name a few. They told important stories that had yet to be told. They connected us with the rich and layered world we live in.
But then the world changed in ways we couldn’t anticipate. The internet, royalty free images, a withered the media industry, Facebook, Instagram and the ubiquitous iPhone. Today, everyone is a photographer, a citizen journalist, a blogger. Some of the most iconic images of our time are snapshots from a smartphone or point-and-shoot. Think Abu Graib. To survive, many photojournalists I know, myself included, had to reinvent themselves, be it in academia, new media, PR or other related pursuits.
A few lucky ones soldier on. But then there are outliers. Take Aaron Huey, who pivoted in an unexpected and highly innovative direction, redefining the power of images through a heady combination of photos, art and language.
Without a doubt, National Geographic is a great gig. But Huey was looking for a more robust platform for advocacy journalism, which is ever more essential in the Trump era.
“Art is the light in these very dark times,” Huey stated.
Trump had yet to announce his presidential aspirations in 2014, when Huey launched the Amplifier Foundation, an “art machine for social change.” It was the next level for an expanding portfolio of documentary work of the Lakota on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, TED talks and a series of interactive multi-media collaborations, including a National Geographic-supported community storytelling project. It built on previous collaborations with artist activists, Shepard Fairey, renowned for his Obama “HOPE” posters, which went viral in 2008 and Ernesto Yerena, creator of Hecho Con Ganas.
A triptych for the Trump era
Fast forward to Trump’s unexpected election win. Journalism just wasn’t enough to do the advocacy work, Huey explained. He and Fairey joined forces again to launch a simple-but-brilliant guerrilla fundraising and art distribution movement.
“Today we are in a very different moment, one that requires new images that reject the hate, fear, and open racism that were normalized during the 2016 presidential campaign,” reads the “We the People” Kickstarter intro.
Armed with a mighty series of compelling illustrations, each by recognized artist activists, Amplifier threw an artistic collaboration into high gear. The goal: To sidestep restrictions on signs and banners—and free speech?—on Inauguration Day. It was an overwhelming success. A jaw-dropping 22,840 backers raised a whopping $1,365,105 to fund “a hack” that would distribute the images on a massive scale. Full-page ads ran in major publications providing marchers with posters to take into the streets, hang in windows or paste on walls.
Today these iconic illustrations are the triptych for the post-Trump era. Three compelling images—a Latina, an African American and a Muslim woman—by photographers Arlene Majorado, Delphine Diallo, and Ridwan Adhami, respectively. Each is rendered with Fairey’s trademark style and reinforces a singular statement that unites all Americans: We the People.
Untouchable language in the American narrative
And it’s here that Huey’s story takes another interesting turn. It starts with a question we should all be asking ourselves. “What do you say when the world’s attention is focused on one place,” Huey asked, “…when the whole world is watching?”
The American narrative has been highjacked, Huey continued. How do we get it back on track? Huey gathered thought leaders, students, journalists, heads of leading foundation and poets to create “language labs.” Through these brainstorming sessions, they identified “untouchable language.” It is language that cannot be violated, that is a unifier and that is neither “red” nor “blue.” This paired “We the People” with three basic tenets: We are greater than fear. We defend dignity. We protect each other.
“Art as advocacy. It’s beautifully simple, but really hard to do well,” Huey noted. But art, like some of the most the memorable photographs documenting history, has undeniable power,
“… to represent change, to move change and to assist us in how we walk in the world,” he added.
We’ve hit the one-year mark since the 2016 election. And the world continues to change in unexpected ways. Despite an assault on the media, fake news, Russian interference in the election and #MeToo, the 2017 election results offer a glimmer of hope. They also give me a renewed appreciation for Huey’s approach. In translating powerful images into art, buttressed by simple statements, demanding that we stand by our fundamental values, is it possible we might return to them?
We the People, We the Future
“I don’t have faith in the grownups,” Huey joked. So with backing from Stanford University, Amplifier developed an educational webinar program to bring art in the classroom—engaging more than 2,000 teachers to date—and fostering dialogue around civics, climate change and cross-cultural understanding.
Amplifier has set sights on the future by betting on school children. Yet in the Trump era, there is still a corporate elephant in the room, and Huey wants to tackle it too. Can big business learn how to be a good corporate citizen from art-driven advocacy?
Huey explained that social innovation can also take place in a corporate environment through simple but intentional steps. “Define what you believe in and create a compass,” he said, noting that the success of We the People Kickstarter campaign was founded in “people-power” and was catalyzed by words they believed in.
“If we believe these words, this is our compass,” he said. “Within every company, let there be a compass.”
by Jacqueline Koch | Oct 3, 2017 |
By Jacqueline Koch
Translating the story of our time starts with a single word
Sun and smoke! If you weren’t from the Emerald City, you’d think this was the big draw for this weekend’s Hempfest. If you are from the Emerald City, then you know better. Sun and smoke became our terrifying daily weather forecast for the first half of August.
As wildfires raged in British Columbia, Canada, and smoke poured over the border, this summer our usually Emerald City took on a peculiar, apocalyptic, “Hello Beijing!” look. In a painful twist of coincidence—or is it irony?—Al Gore released “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” As they say, “timing is everything” and as the film drew movie goers across the country, we Seattleites bear witness from our beautiful Pacific Northwest perch: all the warnings issued in Gore’s first film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” (2006) are coming to pass.
“The warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences,” Gore stated in the film.
Now 11 years down the road, Seattle made international headlines as a reference point to the reality of climate change. And make no mistake, climate change is the defining story of our era. Look to The Guardian —The Biggest Story in the World— and National Geographic, “The biggest story of our time.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Most people (40-80%) think that climate change will harm Americans, (LEFT) but few (20-50%) think it will happen to them (RIGHT).
Climate change believers and doubters
So as we are choking on billows of wildfire smoke, why do clouds of doubt and denial continue to gather, swirl and muddy public opinion? Last spring, The New York Times offered a colorful set of data maps to illustrate the different views, conversations and questions surrounding climate change.
Why do most people think that climate change will harm Americans, but at the same time, they don’t think it will impact them personally? Everybody talks about the weather. But the climate? It turns out, it is not discussed everywhere.
What leads to this gap in understanding? Disinformation campaigns? Special interests? Fake news? We can spend a lot of time debating the great disconnect in the public understanding of climate change – yet let’s remember that 97 percent of climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.
Boost! Collective is founded on the power of storytelling, so we ask the question: Where did we go wrong in telling the climate change story, one of existential importance to us all?
A theory of climate change
Perhaps it all starts with a word: “theory.” Climate science is often couched in terms of “a theory.” (Note the danger quotes!). The public and the scientific community, including academics, researchers, scholars, each have their interpretation. And the resulting lack of alignment has pitted a mere hunch or guess—as the general public would more likely define theory—against how scientists apply the word, as a body of well-substantiated facts, repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment.
In a number of easy-to-understand graphics offered by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, we begin to grasp the breadth of diverging public perceptions about climate change, and, perhaps begin to understand how to address gaps in public understanding. We must take into account that “climate change communication is shaped by our different experiences, mental and cultural models, and underlying values and world views.”
But it still sounds like one Phd talking to another. Roughly translated: It’s time to understand our audience. Or audiences. And let’s adapt the message to ensure that they truly understand that change is real, climate change is happening.
Developing a shared language
So as a veil of unbreathable air descended on our fair city, forcing children and the elderly to stay inside, it’s high time to truly adopt a shared language. We must invest in, elevate and make the academic firepower that brings us these important insights accessible to all. So how do we harness these voices to ignite smarter policy and public understanding?
“Academics need to start playing a more prominent role in society instead of largely remaining observers who write about the world from within ivory towers and publish their findings in journals hidden behind expensive digital paywalls,” stated Savo Heleta, manager, Internationalization at Home and Research, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.
At the heart of his recent article—Academics can change the world – if they stop talking only to their peers—he points to the ways in which academics can push their valuable research and insights into the mainstream conversation. With the help of university and government incentives and training that embeds “the art of explaining complex concepts to a lay audience,” they can dramatically expand their role in a broader dialogue.
It’s an exciting trend for our time—lose the big words, the jargon and tell us a story instead. The climate change story is real, and really scary. We all have much to gain, now more than ever, should academics take the important step to translate their work for a broader audience.
If they don’t, we will only continue to wade deeper into Gore’s “period of consequences.”
Stay tuned for our next installment, exploring how women voices—as mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters, community leaders and public intellectuals—are shaping the climate change conversation.
Boost! Collective is actively involved in the conversation of issues that matter: equality and social justice, environment, wilderness preservation, homelessness, healthcare, global health and development and technology and education, among others. This is the first in a series of blogs that will address the ways in which we include all voices in these conversations, and to make them rich, layered and comprehensive so as to realize meaningful, positive social change.
by Jacqueline Koch | Sep 12, 2017 |
By Janinne Brunyee
At Boost! Collective, we are committed to the art of storytelling. Why? Because we believe that an engaging story energizes your audience to act. It drives results by providing meaning and purpose to the work of your organization. Our goal, and a mission we take with great commitment, is to combine the key ideas that communicate value with a compelling story to create a truly unique message that will rise above the noise and endure.
Is storytelling simply the latest marketing cliche?
For many marketing teams, storytelling is simply a buzzword. While the idea of storytelling is almost universally appealing and easy to understand, it is not always clear how to implement it within an organizational setting. That is because it doesn’t matter how complex or convoluted an organization and its products/services may be, there is always a human story to be told. In organizational settings, storytelling is always human-centered.
Stories help move your organization forward because they are personal, authentic and compelling. The key to persuading people is by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do that is to tell a compelling story.
What is the return on storytelling?
The return on storytelling is: Did you make a connection? Did people find it valuable enough to share? Did they remember your message? The potential return becomes particular interesting when you consider that stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone. When data and story are used together, audiences are moved both emotionally and intellectually.
To get the creative juices flowing, we put together a tiny book that explains why and how your team take take advantage of this invaluable tool to drive deep and authentic engagement with your audiences.
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 | Mar 28, 2017 |
By Christopher Ross
Few people dispute the effectiveness of storytelling. Whether it’s an anecdote of how a story silenced a room filled with people, or how neuroscientists use MRI’s to demonstrate how our brains light up and react to stories. From Harvard Business Review to independent labs, there is a tremendous amount of research underway to continue to explain the efficacy of stories. However, I would suggest this is something we intuitively understand because there is a very simple explanation: A good story can capture an audience.
Yet there is even something more basic at work. Stories can feed a need. A compelling story, especially a great fictional story, can be the perfect diversion to all that is going on in the world today. Perhaps that’s why for the past two years in a row, adult non-fiction book sales are up. And live action miniseries are on the rise with more and more cable channels like AMC and FX and streaming services like Netflix and Amazon entering the space. They are all delivering action and entertainment to a hungry audience that wants a story.
And why not, we all survived an unrelenting bombardment of news during the election season, only to find that as 2017 unfolds, the majority of the news we are consuming continues to be taxing, challenging and vexing. Day in and day out, the steady drip of news feels unrelenting. As Susan Malone says in This Is Why Your Brain Needs A Diversion Right Now, “Have you ever noticed that the more you get caught up in the chaos, the more chaos comes bounding in?”
The distraction of a good story
The challenge is where to turn your attention when you want to relax? The answer for many is to dive into a satisfying story. Nothing provides a better antidote to the news stories today than to turn to a gripping, engaging fictional story. Stories, especially fictional stories, embrace their license to create a narrative that is purely for entertainment, where it is less daunting to decipher who you can trust or what you should believe. While all story genres are great, few would argue that action stories are especially effective at engaging your brain and leveraging all of the audience’s senses.
Perhaps the undisputed king of all action stories today that provides a great diversion and entertains, is HBO’s medieval-fantasy drama series, Game of Thrones (GOT). It is clearly resonating with a huge audience and holds two world records from the Guinness Book of World Records: the most pirated TV program ever, and the largest TV drama simulcast. By the end of its sixth season in 2016, each episode had an average of 25M viewers.
If GOT tells us anything, it’s that the power of a fantastical escape story is undeniable. In 2016, Game of Thrones became the most awarded series in Emmy Awards history. Why? Because GOT is a storyline that follows the traditional hero’s journey, several hero’s as a matter of fact, and it is often challenging to know who the hero is and where their journey will end up. It’s a story that keeps you on your toes and reminds you nothing should be assumed to be off-limits. And it is that unpredictability that keeps the brain so engaged, every cortex lights up and as Paul Zak, a neurologist says, “an amazing neural ballet in which a story line changes the activity of people’s brains” occurs with every episode.
Villains and heroes apply here
What makes GOT particularly satisfying as a diversion, is villains are clearly evil and identifiable. At a time when the news cycles make it impossible to know what you can you trust, it is nice to have some normalcy in terms of your villains and heroes. Few would argue that Cersei Lannister, the Queen Regent of the Seven Kingdoms in the GOT storyline, complete in her flowing robes, long blond hair and soft, almost haunting voice, must be one of the most exquisite female villain on television, even if she is in a mythical medieval period.
So, while all the studies and research are very helpful, they really don’t tell us anything that we don’t already know. We’re all suckers for a good story. With the right amount of narrative or magical intrigue, you can make just about anybody forget the news and noise of the day and lose themselves in a good story!
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We work collaboratively to discover, create and tell the powerful stories that drive deep engagement with your audiences.
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