CATEGORY Brand Strategy & Communications
PARTNER Fender Play Foundation
ROLE Lead Strategist
CAMPAIGN STRATEGY & EDIT DIRECTION

Fender Play: A Giving Tuesday Campaign From Footage That Already Existed

The Brief & Scale

Weeks before Giving Tuesday, the newly launched Fender Play Foundation had no public momentum and little internal awareness among Fender staff. The campaign had a two-week turnaround and no production budget.

Strategic Scope

Built the campaign out of raw, unused footage of Los Angeles students receiving their first guitars: shaped the narrative arc, directed the edit, and ran the distribution plan across social and internal channels.

The Challenge

The footage was shot for nothing in particular. The job was finding a documentary-style human arc inside it, then keeping corporate institutional speak out of the story's way.

POSITIONING & MESSAGING ARCHITECTURE  ·  STAKEHOLDER DISCOVERY  ·  NARRATIVE PLATFORMS  ·  CAMPAIGN STRATEGY  ·  DONOR & FUNDER COMMUNICATIONS  ·  BRAND GUIDELINES  ·  EDITORIAL STRATEGY  ·  MULTI-CHANNEL DEPLOYMENT  ·  INTERNAL ALIGNMENT  ·  POSITIONING & MESSAGING ARCHITECTURE  ·  STAKEHOLDER DISCOVERY  ·  NARRATIVE PLATFORMS  ·  CAMPAIGN STRATEGY  ·  DONOR & FUNDER COMMUNICATIONS  ·  BRAND GUIDELINES  ·  EDITORIAL STRATEGY  ·  MULTI-CHANNEL DEPLOYMENT  ·  INTERNAL ALIGNMENT  · 
EXECUTION FRAMEWORK

Driving High-Performance ROI on a Sprint Timeline

Content Excavation

Mined raw, archival footage of LA youth music programs to identify emotional, story-first moments without needing a new production budget.

Rapid Edit Direction

Authored narrative pacing and directed post-production on a 2-week deadline, creating a documentary-feel social asset built for rapid engagement.

Internal Alignment

Integrated the campaign into internal employee newsletters, educating Fender staff on the foundation mission and building cross-departmental buy-in.

Data-Backed Proof Point

Delivered 55K+ views and 4.5K+ engagements, establishing a performance baseline that went into executive meetings.

WHAT IT PRODUCED

Numbers Off No Budget

  • 55,000+ views and 4,500+ engagements in two weeks, with no production spend.
  • More than double Fender's organic social benchmark across the campaign, and up to twenty times on the top-performing cut.
  • Internal and external at once. The campaign ran through employee newsletters as well as public channels, introducing Fender staff to their own foundation while the public met it for the first time.