Case Study

There’s More to the Story- Connecting through storytelling

New Hope Housing, Inc. a Houston-based non profit that builds high quality housing with services for very low income people, contacted me in the spring of 2018 interested in developing a mission awareness campaign. Though active in the city since XXXX, they felt the organization and its award-winning work was not as well known as it should be. There was also confusion amongst Houstonians between New Hope Housing and Star of Hope, compounded by the fact that both organizations serve homeless populations.

At our first meeting I suggested there were no doubt compelling stories to be found amongst the 1500 residents spread across their 7 properties, and I proposed that I interview a dozen residents to get their life stories. We decided to record audio-only interviews, feeling the presence of a video camera would potentially make our interviewees self-conscious, undermining the comfort they would need to feel to share such personal and difficult stories.

The stories they shared were overwhelming. Interview after interview contained a first person recounting of either abandonment, sexual and emotional abuse, addiction, health crises, or horrendous luck. Many contained most if not all of these conditions. But each one was also a testament to willpower, resiliency, and a profound desire to improve their position in life.

Compelling Content - Honoring the storyteller while getting the job done

After listening and re-listening to these stories, which I held in reverence, it became clear that the content and character of these stories was at odds with traditional marketing exigencies - distillation, simplification, quick takes and upbeat content. These stories were instead complex, contradictory, nuanced, not easily consumed, and for the greatest part decidedly not upbeat.

Online one day and still reflecting on how to maintain the integrity of the stories while still meeting the intent of the awareness campaign, I realized there was a format counterintuitive to the idea of sharing intimate, difficult content but also potentially effective in highlighting the stories and spreading the mission of New Hope Housing - Twitter.

Thwarting expectations - The value of tension

Twitter’s (at the time) limit of 140 characters made it an ill-suited vehicle for narrative storytelling. Counterintuitively, this was its strength. It allowed us to characterize the arc of the story hyper-episodically three times a week over the course of two weeks. With each post, the underpinning idea of the campaign - there’s more to the story - was literally reinforced. In addition, we used emojis in the tweets, even in reference to profoundly tragic events, providing some tension between this often harrowing content and the typical use of emojis as light-hearted or humorous punctuation. It was our aspiration that this unexpected dissonance would create a pausing into which a feeling of empathy might arise in the reader.

The “More” of the Story

The “more” of the story implied by the tweets was found in a There’s More to the Story microsite where one could find a library comprised of twelve “chapters,” each a video of a captioned, audio-only edit of our interviews, using only the storyteller’s words.

Merchandise

The Hermann Park Conservancy, an early supporter of HIWI gave us an opportunity to co-promote HIWI and Hermann Park at the park's reopening celebration after a major renovation. As this happened in early summer, we produced old-fashion hand fans, like those one used to find in churches or funeral homes. On one side of the fan was the website's URL and the Houston. It's Worth It. logotype with an added ellipses, and on the other, the words, "because of Hermann Park." Shifting the association from "in spite of," to "because of" allowed for us to co-promote with non-profits and other entities. These co-promotions were always represented graphically with HIWI's palette and typography. The choice of hand fans speaks to another strategy that we tried to use whenever possible: creating merchandise that in some way referred to one of the afflictions.

T-shirts were initial vehicle of choice to promote the brand. We produced one with just a list of the twenty afflictions, as well as the mosquitoes tee, the flying cockroaches tee, the flooding tee and the sprawl tee. We produced travel mugs with the traffic affliction; the mosquitoes caps; an umbrella in honor of the flooding; and as a gift for our friends in northern climates, an ice scraper with a quote submitted to the HIWI website: "You never have to scrape ice off your windshield before driving away in the morning."

Quotations gleaned from submissions to the "Tell Us Why" section of the website were also used in other ways. We produced a set of post cards with an affliction on the front, and a related quote taken from the website on the back. The flying cockroaches post card quote read, "What's a tad of humidity and a few cockroaches among friends." Along with honest acceptance, self-deprecating humor was a key attribute identified in the original conversation of what an image campaign for Houston should include.

Press

Houston. It's Worth It. garnered a great deal of publicity - both local and national. Stories on the campaign were published in the Houston Chronicle (once in the business section, once as an editorial); Boston Globe; New York Times; Los Angeles Times; Dallas Morning News as well as interviews on The Today Show and NPR. The campaign was publicly recognized in other ways as well. Rice University President, David Leebron referenced HIWI in his inaugural commencement speech. Dr. Stephen Klineberg's Houston Area Survey, a highly anticipated annual presentation to the Greater Houston Partnership, was titled, "Houston. It's Worth It."

Phase II - "Show Us Why"

After a couple years of steady sales of merchandise and activity on the website where Houstonians had told us why they loved their city, I became interested to see if they would also show us why. In an effort to find out, we teamed up with the Houston Center for Photography (HCP) to co-produce an event for their annual summer fund raiser. Written submissions to the website had been unexpectedly poetic, and we wanted to encourage Houstonians to submit photographic equivalents. To encourage this, we drew a distinction between images of Houston seen in typical convention bureau promotion and the idiosyncratic potential of the images we hoped our HIWI tribe would submit.

As an enticement to participate, we announced the possibility of publication in a book, though we were uncertain how many people would respond and of the quality of their photos, concerns that proved to be unnecessary. We received over 600 images, the great majority of which came from non-professional photographers, and hung every one of them salon style in the galleries of HCP. Once again, the community responded enthusiastically, with HCP breaking all attendance records over the brief weekend run of the show.

Phase III - HIWI, the Book

The book comprised images submitted to the HCP show as well as selected comments from the Houston. It's Worth It. website. This was a relatively early crowd-sourced book.  Though the content of the book came from multiple contributors with widely varying aesthetics, the book was conceived and designed by one entity, providing a cohesive structure for the wide range of content within. HIWI was self-published and distributed, being available at Amazon, most bookstores in Houston, as well as several retail shops and even a grocery store (HEB).  Over 20,000 copies have been sold and it's currently on its third printing.

Phase IV - HIWI:IKE

Considering that the entire campaign was funded from ttweak's coffers, which is to say barely at all, Houston. It's Worth It. was a remarkably well established brand by the time Hurricane Ike arrived in September of 2008. In the aftermath of the hurricane, we felt that a new book dedicated to Ike might be a positive and more vibrant record of the storm than traditional journalistic forms. Soon after the hurricane, we put out another call for entries, this time asking not only for photographs, but also journal entries, song lists, blog posts - all different ways of documenting the storm and its aftermath. Because of familiarity with the HIWI brand and the HIWI book's success, Houstonians had a strong sense of what kind of images we were looking for, and they responding in typically amazing fashion. Once we received the submissions and completed the book design, we used images and comments submitted to us to advertise the book. The voice of these ads is so unmistakably authentic and, again, Houstonians' self-deprecating humor shines through.

In conclusion

Houston. It's Worth It. holds innumerable branding lessons. It's main tenets - honesty, authenticity, and humor proved to be a winning combination. Authenticity is not something that can be manufactured, it can only be uncovered and accepted. Once this has happened, the truest and most efficacious expression of that authenticity, what it is to make a brand, reveals itself, and keeps revealing itself in different manifestations as the work continues. It is an approach very much akin to art making. This approach provides a space for the audience, like the viewer of a work of art, to participate in its creation; to bring their own perspective, ideas, and contributions, creating a vibrancy that lasts longer than a season, and a loyalty that no amount of money can buy.