make it matter.
Thanks for checking out my projects below.
move fast and break things
but in a good way.
Project: Breaking Barriers website and social
Client: adidas
Media: Web / Social
Moving fast and breaking things as a Silicon Valley mantra? Turns out, pretty bad idea. The same sentiment when it comes to helping young women achieve equity in sports? Excellent!
I worked with impact agency 17 Sport to help write messaging for the launch of adidas’s Breaking Barriers european initiative (including copy that partner organizations could use to spread the word on their channels). My only regret is that this was remote work instead of meeting in cafes in France. So when are we tackling the US market?
Role: Writer
Creative Director: Halina Myers
Agency: 17 Sport
Less doom scrolling.
More delight scrolling.
Project: 23andMe social
Client: 23andMe
Media: IG, FB, X, TikTok
In the three years I worked with 23andMe, I covered a lot of copy areas, including, for a time, writing all kinds of social posts. While I also wrote everything from campaign concepts to email marketing, my favorite moments were working with the social team. Btw, genetics can be pretty delightful. Here’s proof.
Small business Saturday
But make it google.
“When we support the places we love, we make the places we live better.”
Project: Google Get Your Business Online
Client: Google
Media: Video
Google wants small businesses to thrive because they believe when small businesses do well, communities do too.
To make the video, we traveled across the U.S. to talk to small business owners and their customers about how small businesses support vibrant communities. We also created code that enabled us to generate thousands of localized versions of the video featuring nearby highway signs, hometown businesses, and Google Maps images.
Say, for example, you find yourself watching the video in Baraboo Wisconsin...
Role: Writer
Art Director: Jessie Graham
Director: Brett Fallentine
major philanthropy brief:
rethink everything.
Project: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Web Rebrand
Client: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Media: Web, Video
CZI had a very delicate needle to thread. How could they rebrand themselves online without being pegged as the “Facebook Foundation?” Specifically, how should they rethink their design, content, and copy?
The goal of the new website was to focus the content and messaging on the people closest to the social impact work (as opposed to the tendency of some philanthropies to put their agendas/contributions first). Creative director Mary Fagot and Whirled founder Scott Chan led the creative and set the vision. I was proud to ride shotgun on this project.
Project highlights: working with Aly Tamboura, a program manager formerly incarcerated at San Quentin, to help edit his story and supporting Mary and Scott on the “Circle” video below.
Role: Writer
Creative Director: Mary Fagot and Scott Chan
Video Director: Rosie Haber
Production Company: Whirled
Need a blueprint for change?
She’s got you.
“No one is powerless when we come together.”
Project: Hope-a-Nomics
Client: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Media: Video
Amanda Nguyen is an exemplary human. She’s a sexual assault survivor who discovered that her civil rights were not protected so she founded Rise, an organization that established rights for herself and millions of other survivors. Along the way, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, nbd.
As impressive as her bio is, Amanda wasn’t the primary focus of our project. The purpose of the video was to provide an introduction to her advocacy techniques so change makers everywhere could successfully move their causes forward.
Role: Writer
Creative Director: Mary Fagot
Production Company: Whirled
Animation: Legwork
Facebook faces facts.
(but is it enough?)
“One of the challenges of misinformation is that there is no one consensus or source for truth.”
Project: Facing Facts, Facebook’s Fight Against Misinformation
Client: Facebook
Media: Video
Facebook is a place billions of people go every day to share everything from breaking news to baby pictures. It’s also attracted a huge amount of controversy for its failure to curb disinformation on its platform. Owning up to that failure and describing the company’s efforts to fix the problem was the goal of the brief. Clearly, their efforts have yet to work. That’s why I’ve added some extra post-game context about this project below.
The 11-minute film is a snapshot in time looking inside the company in May of 2018 as it grappled with a tsunami of misinformation. We interviewed the people who were on the teams working on stemming this tide and learned about some of the complex challenges they faced. That said, with the benefit of several years of hindsight (and more revelations about the company in the news), it’s fair to ask if the highest levels of the company were truly making disinformation their first priority. It’s also fair to note that this is an industry-wide problem that all the major social media platforms have yet to solve.
While there are several things I’d revisit about this film, the project taught me valuable lessons about long-form doc-style content and its limits.
Role: Writer
Director: Morgan Neville
Production Company: Radical Media
what if we used youtube’s algorithm
for good?
Project: YouTube Social Impact Web Rebrand
Client: YouTube
Media: Web
People associate YouTube with many things; social impact isn’t usually one of them. But that’s a huge missed opportunity. With over one billion active users, the platform has an audience with the power to do much more than zoning out to influencer videos.
We worked with design company Use All Five to redesign the YouTube Social Impact website to show how to use the platform for good. Among many other things, we included video storytelling tutorials, a curated library of successful social impact videos, and a huge set of related resources for anyone interested in using video to spark change.
Role: Writer
Design Studio: Use All Five
but can you sell things?
“Approved.”
Most of my work isn’t typical advertising portfolio material and that’s generally a good thing. Of course, I should also point out that I’ve done my fair share of advertising you’d recognize as advertising. I’m not putting much of it here because, truthfully, the projects I’ve featured above are better. But, yes, I know how to move some product and I’d be happy to talk about my experience working on VW, Hyundai, Kia, Apple, Beats, etc., anytime.
The hamster image below is from a fun little Kia project. We created a concept for a phone game to promote the Soul where players drove through a series of obstacles while building a music track one element at a time. The brand love we inspired, along with the web work we were doing, likely sold some Souls.
The image below is from a global print campaign I did for Apple. It’s still a career highlight because Steve Jobs greenlit something I wrote. I never met him or actually heard him say the word “approved” but, yeah, that happened. (Phones were small then. It was a thing. Google it.)
You made it. Thank you.
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