Discover how our Starship heroes are breaking the internet (pretty much!).
Last year one of Wendy’s gorgeous friends Bridget Jackson spent a crazy amount of time in Starship Child Health hospital with her daughter who underwent a heart transplant at aged just 13. Wendy could not imagine how intense and worrying that experience was. But her friend and her daughter were surrounded by the incredible Starship heroes that made this very vulnerable and scary experience become a safe, kind, special and loving one.
This year Wendy accompanied Biddy to a Starship Foundation fundraising event to hear entrepreneur and creative powerhouse Mimi Gilmour, of restaurants Mexico, Burger Burger and Fish Fish, share her deeply personal story about her beautiful baby daughter Olympia, who suffered a major brain injury before she was born. This year in June, Mimi fundraised through her business Burger Burger to buy five portable neurology monitors for the hospital that help parents with kids who experience seizures. WOW!
Mimi’s story deeply resonated with Wendy as a mum of two healthy girls, and reminded her how lucky she was. At that event Wendy recognised that she was in the very fortunate position to help other parents by mobilising an army of supporters who could get behind Starship, not just in a one-off campaign, but for a lifetime through digital and social media.
So when Wendy met with new Starship Foundation CEO, Aisha Daji Punga (pictured above with Directors of Starship Child Health, Dr Mike Shepherd and Dr John Beca) they set out to make it happen. Aisha told me she wanted to take the sentiment that people genuinely feel for Starship to the next level. Billboards and fundraising campaigns have worked well in the past, but there now exists a huge opportunity to do more to engage all of New Zealand in the unbelievable work Starship was doing. The challenge is to build the brand and authentically engage with people in digital.
It was not about painting the story about the kids being victims, rather showing that they were heroes and inviting everyone on their journey in a fun, engaging, positive way.
Our Starship heroes
The doctors, nurses and of course, the kids are Starship heroes and we at Socialites have partnered with the Starship Foundation to share the amazing, inspirational new video content series ‘Inside Starship’ where Kiwis get to meet these awesome people in a series of videos.
But we have flipped storytelling on its head: the kids interview the doctors and nurses!!
We wanted these kids to say with pride in their voice that “I’m a Starship kid and I’m cool!”
…And you know the saying, never work with kids and animals because they run the show… well these kids definitely DO run the show and it couldn’t be better because of that!! (One Starship kid didn’t want to use the set interview questions, so wrote their own!!).
We see the doctors and nurses in their own natural world, where they are safe to show their vulnerability, as they open up to the kids who ask the “tough” questions. We never know what is going to happen next (but that it’ll be amazing)!!!
The impact this storytelling is having
Aisha, her team, and we at Socialites wanted to do much, much more than simply create content for content’s sake. We want people to feel part of the Starship community and want to stay connected with it.
This video content series is an efficient, authentic and personal way to start and continue a relationship with the people who can support Starship. Plus, it’s fun!
Starship Child Health relies on donations, and its needs are costly, urgent and constant. Building a genuine digitally-based database of engaged supporters is absolutely key to its future. So although the content is certainly magic all on its own, much more digital magic is happening behind the scenes with our team using Facebook tools to build the Starship Foundation its very own qualified database it can use now and in the future to connect with its community.
#InsideStarship #starshipheroes
