Issimo is a story agency based in Utah. They help organizations crystallize their own story and communicate it through video. The goal is always to inspire the audience to action and make the world a better place. Jacob Hoehne founded the company in 2006, Bryce Gandy was the director on this project and has been with Issimo since 2010, and Zach Kempf and Brett Belingheri are the other members of the Issimo family. They each love to travel, learn new things, and are storytellers at heart.

How did you land this job with Npower?

The founder of ISSIMO, Jacob Hoehne, met Binta Vann-Joseph at the Sorenson Impact Summit during a session on storytelling for impact. . It was an open discussion and Binta really connected with the powerful storytelling we did in “Think a New Thought” that we created for the Laudato Si Challenge at the Vatican (https://vimeo.com/245592894). She wanted to explore how we might do something similar for her organization. She expected our services to be well outside of her budget, but was pleasantly surprised that she could utilize almost the same budget she had been spending.

Who came up with the NPower video concept?

Our process always starts by asking a lot of questions. You can’t tell a story that you don’t understand completely. We want to know not only what an organization does and how they do it, but why they exist in the first place, what motivates them, what needs in the world are they addressing, what is the experience like for those they serve, what challenges do they face, etc. In addition to that we aren’t going to be effective at telling their story if we don’t understand the intended audience, who they are, why they should care, and what motivates them.

We met as a team and discussed possible concepts, and settled pretty quickly on a documentary approach with some simple dramatic recreations for certain segments. The concept itself wasn’t extremely unique, but we knew its success would depend on our ability to identify the right stories and then help those people share their stories for the cameras.

How did you go about building your team for this project? This project had some budget constraints that meant we needed to work really efficiently, with a small and mobile crew. Luckily we have some experience with that, so our team included two cameramen from Issimo who also doubled as producer/director/audio/gaffer on the shoot. We also had some help on-site from NPower during our 3 days of filming in New York and New Jersey.

Partnerships with companies like Citi help place NPower students in competitive internships and jobs.

Are there any important lessons you learned or ways the story changed during the production process?You have to be flexible and ready to improvise at a moment’s notice. Nothing ever goes quite as planned. Sometimes there are happy surprises that work to your advantage, but most of the time you’ve got to roll with the punches and get the most out of what is available to you.

Is there any quantifiable data that you can share about how this video specifically impacted NPower? The video was first used at a fundraising dinner NPower held in October 2019. In the first 15 minutes they raised more than double what had been raised the previous year.

Then, in their December fundraising push, they increased the amount of money raised from the previous year and the number of individual donors. Both of those are key metrics that they keep track of and are important for their continual fundraising efforts.

They were very grateful to have high quality storytelling as a part of their campaign and saw the difference it made in their fundraising results. They have an excellent team that knows how to fundraise, and I like to think of our work as giving them the ammunition they need to be more effective and efficient in their job.

What has the reception been like for this video? One of the things that left me feeling really satisfied as a filmmaker was that all of the subjects who participated were at the event where it premiered and they were all really proud to be a part of it. Often I’ll say to a subject that it is our job to make them look good. We want to represent them in an authentic way, but also in a way that they are comfortable being seen. They put a lot of trust in us when they let us put cameras in their face, so their personal reaction for me was just as gratifying as any other.

The Alvarado family in front of their home. All three of them went through the NPower program and now have jobs at Fortune 500 companies.

Were you paid to create this project? Yes we were paid for this project. NPower believed in the importance of video and telling their story well. And since they were familiar with our work and how effective it could be it gave them the confidence to use their media budget on a project like this. We also recommended and explored the option of selling a sponsorship for their October event that would cover the cost of the media for the campaign. In return the sponsor would get name recognition and could be included in the story content. There wasn’t enough time to have that sponsorship happen this year, but moving forward we think there could be demand for that sponsorship in future years based on how the video was received at this year's event.

Tell us a little bit about Issimo and the work that you do? We call ourselves a story agency, because we know that telling a good story is what will open doors and reach an audience on an emotional level. We believe our most important work happens before we ever pull out the cameras. We like to dig deep and ask a lot of questions of our clients to understand them on a deeper level. It’s exciting to tell inspiring stories that move people to action.

Is there any advice you’d like to share with other media makers and nonprofits? I think our best work always comes out when we are really invested in the difference we can make, and we have a relationship of trust with our clients that allows us room to experiment a little. It's okay to have constraints in projects, that actually leads to more creativity as we solve for those constraints, but nothing can make up for being passionate about the project at hand. That really does make all the difference.

See more of Issimo’s work at https://issimo.co/

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Real Nonprofit Stories is a blog series that NGO Storytelling produces to share the creative process of humanitarian storytellers and nonprofits communications teams in the field. If you’d like to have a project considered for this series please visit our submissions page.

Issimo Creates Stories with Impact for NPower