For International Women’s Day, I worked with our fundraising and video team to create a brand-awareness campaign for CCF. We wanted to show the breadth of what CCF does through the stories of four women. The name of our organization is Cambodian Children’s Fund, but our work goes far beyond helping children.
CCF has six areas of focus (leadership, community outreach, healthcare, childcare, education and vocational training). Within these six programs, over 60 activities fit into them (nutritious bread program, free dinners, clean water, dental care, college education, we even built over 200 houses last year and plan on building 300 more this year). CCF does so much for the people of Steung Meanchey! I am pretty often overwhelmed when trying to explain CCF to friends or acquaintances.
the design that went with the Facebook post of the Granny Sponsorship video
Lately our team has focused on explaining how CCF is more than just a children's organization. This campaign was one of our first organized attempts at showing our audience the breadth of the work we do.
the format I used for the statistic overlays within the video
While the 4-part video and design campaign was successful (over 200 shares, 3k engagement and a 94k reach), it was not as successful as other campaigns we’ve done in the past. It was unique in its approach and It was definitely something that most of our viewers and audience have never seen from CCF.
While producing this, we wanted to specifically showcase the statistics and impact of the work CCF is doing. We wanted to give concrete evidence of the impact of the work we do on the ground here in Phnom Penh.
I personally wanted to create beautiful typography, design and video to explain our impact. We did all these things and we did them successfully. But what I think this campaign lacked was a direct connection with the women who are featured in it.
The biggest take away for me was a reminder of the most important lesson I learned in college while studying photojournalism: people connect with stories. The strongest tool CCF has in communicating the impact of our work is the stories of the people we have helped. In 2015 (only 3 months in), the Facebook post with the most engagement and biggest reach had only 2 sentences and a before and after photo that showed a tiny girl enrolled in CCF. That simple photo-post diptych had over 3.3k likes, comments and shares. It had a 100,000-person organic reach.
This year we have many campaigns planned and although this campaign wasn’t as successful as I wanted it to be, by taking a risk and producing high quality media, we learned that leading with stories and keeping things simple will always have a great impact on CCF’s audience. We also creatively told over 94,000 people that CCF is more than just a children’s organization. That is important.
Working on this campaign was so much fun. I storyboarded, illustrated, collaborated with our incredible grant writing team, helped our film team shoot these ladies on a white background, edited 5 videos, created the typography by hand and I even did the tiny animation work at the beginning of the videos. This is what I love doing: combining photo, video, animation and design to tell stories that people connect with. I was up until 12 am one night doing the typography and I thought to myself, my job is so cool…
storyboards for the video
