National Geographic — Becca Hovland

Background

We all know National Geographic. How about the National Geographic Society (NGS)? It’s their global non-profit organization committed to exploring, illuminating, and protecting the wonder of our world.

Challenge

NGS came to us to help develop a new brand that would inspire young people globally to find solutions to the earth’s problems.

The brand’s name? Generation Geo.

The challenge? Catch the attention of a younger audience while maintaining the historic Nat Geo brand DNA.

Audience

In previous work with National Geographic, we established three key audience segments. The brand’s historic focus (and whom most of their comms efforts were geared towards) was on Established Young Leaders or young people already engaged with the brand and already doing work on social issues.

In order for the Generation Geo community to be more inclusive, we needed to expand this focus to also include the Civically Minded and Socially Curious and Beginning to Make Change segments - young people more new to the Nat Geo brand and who represent a majority of their audience.

Co-Creation

The project’s strategy lead, Grace Kwon, and I developed four 2-hour virtual co-creation workshops with young people around the world. The goal was to gather insights directly from young people who fit into our audience segment requirements to help shape the strategic and creative manifestation of Generation Geo. In each session, youth attendees participated in a series of interactive exercises and engaged in group discussions.

Through a series of exercises, we learned about young people’s perception of NGS, tested youth-centered GenGeo content & messages, found out what garners broad interest and support amongst young people, and uncovered insights to create a youth-supported Generation Geo narrative.

I wrote the following manifesto for the co-creation workshops which was based on stories shared by the NGS creative team of the history and mission of NGS. We used the manifesto to pressure test what parts of the NGS history resonated with youth.

Participants showed emotions of excitement, inspiration, and motivation. The following anecdotes shared by youth were keywords we considered when formulating an overarching narrative around the Generation Geo community:

Co-Creation Takeaways

Following the co-creation sessions, we synthesized our learnings to share with the client in order to strategically align with them and push the legacy org towards a more inclusive and equitable future. We shared these insights:

“National Geographic feels like a monolithic, prestigious organization. They are exclusive but also open to those who seem ‘worthy’.”

— Workshop Participant

Creative Concepts

Historically, the National Geographic brand reflected the Hero archetype. Based on our co-creation workshops and research, we saw a unique opportunity to position GenGeo as a viable movement leader on issues at the intersections like environmental justice.

A fresh, intersectional, solutions-oriented message expressed through the Everyperson archetype (in a communal and emotional tone) is what we saw as key to reaching and inspiring new audiences of young people across the globe.

To test these two personas, we made distinct creative assets comparing the following characteristics - communal vs individual and informative vs emotional.

Our visual approach leveraged the insights gathered in co-creation sessions to establish an accessible, imaginative identity with a grassroots, youthful feeling - one that young people could relate to and be inspired by broadly.

We kept the Nat Geo yellow to ensure brand recognition while illustrations pushed the brand away from elitism with a fresh approach.

Testing

In addition to audience research, partnership analysis, an audit of National Geographic’s programs, channels, and community reach among young people, we facilitated creative testing. On Instagram and Facebook, we tested for impressions and engagement as well as acquisition.

Our testing objectives included:

1.

Identify the message (archetype + tone) that reaches our audience the most, and that our audience is most engaged with.

Hypothesis:
#GenGeo messages that use the Every Person archetype and center intersectional values will be seen and engaged by our audience at greater rates than those of messages that use NatGeo's existing heroic archetypal messaging.

2.

Determine whether or not our message is the most engaging message consistently across segments of the #GenGeo audience.

Hypothesis:
#GenGeo messages that use the Every Person archetype and center intersectional values will be seen and engaged with at greater rates than NatGeo's existing heroic archetypal messaging regardless of an audience members relationship to #GenGeo along the ladder of engagement.

Overall, the Every-Person archetype over-performed across audiences, with the Emotional tone being the lead motivator to engagement.

Young people engaged with our assets at fantastic rates and data indicated that targeting global audiences of young people via emotional and inclusive messages might be most effective starting point in building GenGeo's community and culture.

These testing results informed our recommendation for Gen Geo’s narrative:

We compiled our findings from each stage of the discovery process as well as creative and channel recommendations in a Gen Geo Narrative Guidelines document.

Narrative Guidelines