Bi-Lingual Video Series for Non-Profit brings community parenting stories to life and aids in future grant efforts to continue programing.
Illinois Action for Children partnered with the team at fig media to create a short documentary series about their statewide efforts to supercharge early childhood education programs. The multi-zipcode, bi-lingual production spanned three communities, 12 interviews, multiple communications asks and teams.
Challenges
In our initial kick off meetings, our team was impressed by the sheer amount of writing, thinking, strategy, data and copy material Illinois Action for Children already had to document their community parenting support saturation program. Just say that five times fast: Community support parenting saturation program.
They came to us wanting to tell the story of their successful pilot program by engaging the communities they serve. Our challenge was to keep the stories human while celebrating the large scale strategy thinking that included multiple teams, bi-lingual immigrant communities, specific communications copy needed for targeted grant writing, rallying tiny humans and creating an awareness video that could secure sustained momentum with partners that expect results.
Whoo-boy, that was a lot to ask.
How our services were used
This client utilized our facilitation and scriptwriting expertise to ensure that the process of filming was easy, fun, equitable and combatted stereotypes about the communities they serve. Our writer -director, Melissa Fox, worked closely with translators to make sure all bi-lingual community was represented in their spoken language of choice while facilitating the team at IAFC through a creative process that ensured all voices and needs were at the table to be heard before any cameras came out. We pre-interviewed all participants and used those interviews to create a structure for the series that could tell the story of IAFC, the program, each community and each parent. That took skill, deep listening and trust building.
Once our scripted materials were approved we hit the ground and captured three communities in Aurora, Rockford and Chicago North Lawndale. Creating a production that was easy for parents to participate in with their children and remained accessible to all. We organized play groups or classes that were already in motion and slotted our production into the day. This allowed families to relax in familiar environments and allowed our team to capture authentic results. Accessibility is a core value of our non-profit productions. We want all storytelling participants to ease into filming and we respect the complexity of adult life by doing so.
We then took all the materials back to the edit room and brought it to life, giving our client sneak peeks along the way to guide the process. Because the scripting process was so successful and all our participants had a blast at filming, there was minimal editing room decisions to be made. In fact, the process that took the longest was making sure the ADA compliant captions were perfect and the branded materials were up to standards. That makes us happy! It means our facilitation in pre-production did it's job.
Results, Return on Investment and Future Plans
The series hit all our communications goals. Each community was thrilled with the results of how the stories were told and most importantly our client was overjoyed with the results. We will let them tell you about it:
“Fig Media was a dream to work with! We had a complex project – four agencies, three communities, and multiple partners and families to bring together both to tell a single story and to tell four mini-stories of each organization. Melissa and her team worked closely with us and our partners to tell the story in a way that is both compelling and clear. They built trusting relationships with our partners and families, making them feel safe to share their stories. They made filming days fun and helped everyone feel at ease while filming. They accommodated challenging logistics and several rounds of video edits, ensuring we had the perfect end product. I cannot recommend them enough!”
“It was important to me that each community have a say in how they were represented at parents. I’ve dedicated my body of work to combatting stereotypes and “poverty porn,” in our industry. I grew up in a family that needed programs like this. So the thing I am most proud of is how bright, happy, fun and beautiful each human looks on screen. So when I sat down with each parent to work them through the voice over, I was delighted to hear how much they loved seeing their words come together in a nice storytelling package. It’s really important to me that people have agency in that process. Plus, clients like IAFC are a dream to work with because they understand the power of community organizing and they utilized those networks to make sure our production had what we needed to do our job. Our team LOVED filming on-location and I think that shows in the quality of what we created together.”
The series will be used to secure grant funding statewide and expand the program to more communities. We are so excited to be included in providing more support for families where society falls short. The United States is one of the few developed nations to not have nationwide childcare or 0-5yo support for parents. So we really believe in the power of the program and hope this series aids in growing those efforts.
If you have a project that needs documentation for grant funding, we'd love to tell your story! Contact us today to start the conversation.