Thanks to everyone who came to the storytelling webinar Matt Arnold and I hosted yesterday! It was great to see so many friendly faces in the crowd. We loved the questions and insights you shared throughout. Thanks for being a totally awesome audience.
This week, I also had the pleasure of speaking with Carina Kolodny and Ethan Fedida, co-founders of Campfire Group, a digital consultancy that works at the intersection of social impact and storytelling. Their clients have included MTV, the UN Refugee Agency, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CBS Radio, and more.
Carina is an Emmy- and Webby-nominated and Shorty-winning media activist and transmedia storyteller. Ethan is a digital media strategist who has worked at Entercom and the Huffington Post. The latter is where the two met. They eventually decided to combine forces and start Campfire with––in their words––“a vision of the world where companies don’t just do well, they do good.”
We sat down for a Zoom chat about everything from their take on visual media, to clients who aren’t quite ready to tell an authentic story, to breaking free from the “dinosaur-like corporate overlords.”
Here’s what Carina and Ethan had to say. (Some excerpts have been edited lightly for length.)
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On their process for working with clients
Carina: “Sometimes, clients come in and have a specific project in mind and want to build a narrative around it. Sometimes, clients come in and say, ‘we know social impact is important to us,’ and they want us to help them build something from scratch.”
Ethan: “At the end of the day, it’s really about trying to find brands, nonprofits, and companies that are passionate about this. The work from there is the easy part.”
On the role of social impact in storytelling
Carina: “It’s much easier to get attention––to build energy around a story––when a company is trying to do good in the world. These are stories that have a lot of juice behind them.”
On why they’re called Campfire Group
Carina: “What we saw through social and through communications in general, is that everyone was trying to get a bigger and bigger bullhorn to scream their message from the rooftops. What you actually need to do is bring people in. That will serve you so much better than just being the loudest. Also, there’s a long tradition of there just being some stories that, to have their full impact, need to be told around a campfire.”
On turning clients away when they’re not doing social impact authentically
Carina: “This has increasingly become a popular space because people realize they can get something out of it. But people need to give consumers more credit. They will ask questions. And having a presence on Instagram and Twitter is great, but it also gives customers the opportunity to call you out when you’re not doing it right.”
Ethan: “There are a lot of instances where they don’t actually believe in it. They’re trying to check a box, and it comes across as greenwashing or whitewashing or any-washing. And the reason we started Campfire Group is to work on projects we believe in. So it would be totally counterproductive to attach our name to something we thought wasn’t being done the right way.”
On how their journalism background influences their work
Ethan: “When we have conversations with companies around communications and PR, we’ll let them know we come from that space. We were getting pitched tens, hundreds, thousands of stories. We know what journalists look for, what publishers look for. We know what’s going to end up catching people’s attention.”
On learning how to think about a digital audience
Ethan: “I always think back to when I was at HuffPost. I would be toggling between HuffPost Crime, HuffPost Weird News, and each of those verticals were different tones and different audiences. I didn’t really understand that at first. And I would have weekly meetings where I’d be told I was missing the mark. I had to learn how to see those differences, how to understand the specific audiences.”
On what they wish brands knew about storytelling
Carina: “We get so many clients, whether they’re nonprofits or startups or huge corporations, that want to tell the story in a way where they’re the hero. But if you’re hoping to make a meaningful change in the world, you need to position your customer or your user as the hero of the story. When the company is the star of the show, that story won’t take off. It’s just not as effective. If we can get a client to understand that, as soon as we deploy that first story, they’ll get it. Because it will go viral.”
On the importance of trial and error in digital media
Ethan: “We’ve learned you have to be really quick and adaptive in digital. Be willing to try new things and lean into what’s performing. And that can be entirely one thing one moment and something else the other moment. It’s all about saying, let’s try something. But being prepared to move on is also key.”
On what they wish writers knew about writing for video
Carina: “When you’re writing an article that’s just text, you’re doing all of the work. When you’re writing for video, you have sound, you have pacing, you have transitions. It’s an ensemble performance. And like any ensemble, it only works as well as the elements work together. Your words aren’t headlining––they’re responding to what’s happening visually.”
On understanding objectives before diving into a new project
Carina: “We will have a lot of folks come in with a preconceived idea about what they want. Maybe they just went to Sundance and saw something there. Maybe their nephew at NYU told them about building a Clubhouse presence. And that’s great. But we’ve learned the hard way that if we just give them what they ask for, it won’t work as well. We need to know their objectives before we tag things onto them. The last thing I want people to do is invest money into something they wanted but wasn’t actually what they were looking for.”
On what got them interested in the social impact space
Ethan: “It was something I had always been engaged with in my personal life––working with nonprofits, causes where I believed in volunteering my time. And while I enjoyed my previous jobs, they weren’t as fulfilling as they could be. When Carina and I started working together, I realized I could marry my personal interests with my professional interests. It seemed like a slam dunk.”
Carina: “I always had this desire to do good in my work. Working in corporate social responsibility, working in journalism. But I continuously found myself up against these dinosaur-like corporate overlords. I eventually realized that working as a consultant, I had the ear of very important people in organizations, who could then adopt that mentality and take it to other places they worked. And I think I can reach the most people in this capacity.”
On their goal for Campfire Group (and the world)
Carina: “We are out to prove in a really sincere way that companies and organizations can do good. And that doing good and making money are not mutually exclusive. We think if we can prove that in a big way, we’re going to have much better corporate citizens much more quickly.”
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Thanks again to Carina and Ethan for chatting with me! I so appreciated hearing more about their experiences helping tell their clients’ stories.
May we all escape the dinosaur overlords!
Have a great day, everyone.
–Erin
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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