Designing strategies for stories to make an impact
From women’s rights to mental health, politics to art, there are a million stories worth telling. But telling a story successfully requires the right strategy. Take a look below for some examples of strategies that resonated, drove change and made an impact.
Electing the first woman Vice President of Colombia
Marta Lucia Ramirez announced her independent bid to the Colombian Presidency in 2017. In January of 2018 I traveled to Bogota to join her campaign as Coordinator of Communications to support the Director of Communications to develop and manage all communication efforts for an unprecedented primary election to nominate the Presidential nominee for the general election. After collecting over 1.5 million votes she came in second in the primary, confirming her position as the vice presidential nominee. Marta Lucia Ramirez is the current Vice President of Colombia and the first woman in Colombian history to hold the office.
As coordinator I managed day to day communication efforts including supervising ad and media agencies as well as digital and press teams to ensure clear work processes for internal and external communications for the primary election. I also wrote, advised and translated campaign press releases, speeches, letters and internal communication in Spanish and English directed to various stakeholders including business leaders, donors, volunteers, staff and voters. As an active member of the communications committee, I served as liaison to the team at large to organize campaign events, deploy messaging, represent the campaign as needed and support the candidate in the campaign trail.
Funding a mental health revolution
Back in 2016, one in four Americans struggled with mental health, leading to over US$400 billion in lost earnings and health care costs each year not to mention the detrimental impact on quality of life to each and every one of them. Two thirds of those diagnosed were not likely to ever seek treatment
Together with a small team we set out to create Fundamental, a pilot project that could fund a mental health revolution by crowdfunding scientific research. Donors, scientists, and the general public would be able to come together to back government-approved studies in the United States and around the world and help psychedelics be medicalized.
The project was launched May 2017 collecting hundreds of donations and setting a new tone for the conversation around mental health and psychedelic research.
Fighting for women’s reproductive rights in Honduras
In 2009, Honduras became the only country in Latin America to ban emergency contraception disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable women and girls in the country. Ten years later, a grassroots campaign, Hablemos Lo Que Es (Let’s Call It What It Is) was launched to fight disinformation around the topic to educate and persuade Hondurans to get the facts and support women’s access to reproductive health. The task at hand was to encourage a healthy discussion around sexual health and contraception in the hopes that the already deeply conservative Honduran society would support the cause, based on facts, and pressure the government to overturn the legislation once and for all.
Our team worked with partners on the ground to understand the nuance of the conversation in terms of the pervasive disinformation disseminated in the media and the government to develop a campaign that would reach a wide audience in the right way. I led the development of digital outreach campaigns focused on social media, first to build a community to share educational content and lead to action and later on to run an online petition campaign.
Over the course of six months we built a movement gathering the support of young Hondurans all over the country. A community of over 3000 entered the conversation across social media channels voicing their opinions, debunking myths about contraception and inviting their networks to support the cause through branded and user generated content. Our partners lead rallies and marches across some of the largest cities in Honduras and hosted discussion panels and events that were live streamed through the campaign’s channels. As a hub for factual information about reproductive health, the campaign’s website also served to collect over 5,000 signatures demanding that the government overturn the legislation gathered through via social media campaigns and in the field. Today the community continues to grow and pressure their representatives for change.