RESCUING LEFTOVER CUISINE
Rescuing Leftover Cuisine is a non-profit for hunger. They work with restaurants & caterers to get food to those in need, while also reducing food waste & carbon emissions. Their original branch started back 2013 in NYC. Over the past few years, they have expanded around the country and their most recent endeavor was adding a New Jersey branch.
Simply communicating their message with the restaurants was difficult. They also needed more community involvement, from volunteers and just general awareness to help support their cause.
Our mission was to help them better target & engage with that audience, while improving brand awareness.
Challenge
Clarify the brand’s message, their online strategy, & get better engagement from the restaurants, volunteers and community.Outcome
We helped them focus their message & social media strategy to improve involvement from their 2 target audiences. There has been more restaurants & volunteers signed up, increased financial donations, & better community awareness.
Services
Brand Strategy
Videography
Motion Graphics
PRESS
Hoboken Girl Blog
THE GOAL
Rescuing Leftover Cuisine is a non-profit for hunger, founded in NYC. They take leftover food from restaurants and bring that food to shelters. This helps feed the hungry, reduce food waste, and also reduce carbon emissions. The New Jersey was a new branch struggling to get restaurants or volunteers involved in their cause. Their mission was getting restaurants & volunteers onboard with the non-profit. Our mission was to help them engage with their intended audience, get more awareness, but most importantly, their involvement.
THE CHALLENGE
They were a small team going door-to-door reaching out to many restaurants and were met with a lot of hesitation and uncertainty. They felt as though their message wasn't very clear and they wanted to find a way to circumvent some of these obstacles they were typically facing. They also were struggling to get volunteers and although they had a social media, they felt their engagement was low and people weren't signing up to volunteer. They knew they needed to work on a different approach and knew they needed some help.
DEVELOPING THE STRATEGY
We sat down with the Regional Director, Myung, to develop the non-profit's strategy for the upcoming months. We spent a couple sessions surfacing and prioritizing the challenges the organization faced. We were then able to outline some goals and measurable objectives/results from our efforts. This became the framework for the branch's promotional outreach strategy.
CREATING THE CONTENT
We had laid out the priorities. They could take care of the static visual content. We would help them with the rest.
-They needed a video that explained who they were, shared how simple their process was, and why they were so passionate about their cause.
- They wanted to have some dynamic content, animations & video, that they could use on their social platforms to help increase engagement and potentially be used for some sponsored content.
The short-form content was the easy part. We all knew the video would require more...
THE VIDEO
Rescuing Leftover Cuisine wanted to release a video for Giving Tuesday. We had 62 days to get a video out into the world. We had done some brainstorming of various concepts. We thought about having actors, or maybe scripting a short video. We even storyboarded a couple ideas. Finally, we all decided it was best to connect emotionally & authentically, with real people that each play a key role in RLC's purpose. We felt this would help RLC better connect & share their message with restaurants. Others should be more inclined to participate as they are seeing their fellow restauranteers and neighbors getting involved.
We started the preproduction of scheduling & conducting the interviews. It was beautiful hearing all these people share their stories and we were so very fortunate to have Joann, a resident receiving the food donations, share her story. Not everything goes to plan, though. We had planned an interview outside, when suddenly, a landscaping crew stopped by to make as much noise as they possibly could! We were able to adapt and capture a great interview. Myung was thrilled to hear from the interviewees how great the sessions went.
20 days until our deadline, we had conducted all the interviews and Myung was hoping to have one other restaurant participate in the video. It was no problem. We could go about putting the storyline together. Sometimes the timing doesn't work out, and that was the case.
We were now 10 days out. It is normal to get nervous, but with our frequent communications, Myung felt at ease knowing that we had already built a rough edit. I assured her that we had a lot of great content to work with and more than plenty for the purposes of the video.
Now with 7 days left, we had our feedback session. Myung and her team loved the 13 minute rough cut we sent and almost didn't want to make it shorter. We went through all notes, focusing on the story, tone & pacing. We now had to take this 13 minute video down to 6 mins or less and get close to our final draft.
We only needed 1 more revision, adjusting some colors slightly and fixing a couple typos. They were slightly surprised & impressed that we had developed such an efficient workflow for feedback that made this process so smooth. They mentioned this took a lot of nervousness off of their shoulders.
We use a very intuitive workflow that makes it extremely easy for our partners to collaborate & share feedback right on the edit. We also like to include some guidelines to help make the feedback session as straight forward as possible. There can be a lot of opportunity for small, minor changes. We focus back to the goals & objectives we set in the discovery & strategy session to help guide our decisions.
THE ROLLOUt
The day had finally come to share this video. They put it on the Fundraising website, Instagram & Youtube channel. They were happy to see such a high level of engagement on Instagram. They had a link in their bio that brought people to their fundraising & volunteer website.
THE Results
They reported back that they saw engagement by a factor of 54x. They even had more engagement than the founding, NYC corporate branch. The local Councilman in Jersey City even commended them. Since then they have been featured on a local blog, HobokenGirl.com, and exceeded their fundraising targets.
While Giving Tuesday was an important deadline, Myung has been happy to share that the video has been a great tool to share & get other restaurants to participate in their cause.
WANT TO WORK WITH US?
Thanks so much for the help with the video again! We have seen that sharing videos and video clips helps with our IG engagement, which we would like to double down on. Thanks!
- Myung Faye Shin, Regional Chair, RLC