Challenge

My cousin's husband just recently started an autism foundation that started because his youngest son has autism. This disorder basically makes people have a hard time with social behavior, public speaking, communication among others. There is a very wide range of effects that autism might have with people. Before he approached me, I knew that autism existed, but I was not aware of the hard effects it had on people nor did I know the struggles that a kid might go through and a family as well. He was having a hard time receiving donations as he was not familiarized with social networks which was where he had his foundation. Even though there was a lot of content in his foundation page, we never got to the amount of donations that we were looking for and that made him become less motivated even though he knew the problems that his kid went through and wanted to help the cause.

Selection

When he contacted me for help, we decided that the best thing to do is to make people understand the situation that people with autism face and how they affect their families as well. This is when we decided that the storytelling tool was going to be our way to go hoping for people to understand reality and help the cause

Approach

The first story that we decided to film was a short 5-minute video of Ryan talking about how he feels when he sees his kid suffer. With this video we invested some of our donation money into ads in Facebook so that we could reach a higher number of people and our foundation could become bigger and eventually reach our goal. We later found out that there are very few people that watch the whole 5-minute video of a 40-year-old man speaking to the camera and our mission was not successful.

For our second approach, we decided to include Joey, the young kid with autism in the video. This was a much bigger investment, almost all the donations that our family had given to the foundation and this video was specially produced by a short clip company. This is where we reached our goal as the video was a storytelling of a day in Joey´s life and how autism affects him. By seeing the young kid struggle in a very well-made clip, it reached more people’s feelings and that eventually lead to the foundation growing.

Insight and Approach

The amount of people that were touched by the video and the number of users that spoke to us saying that they never knew this was such a problem was huge. In a topic that is very

sensitive such as autism, it is important to make people understand that this is something that might affect anyone and if treated with time, special teachers, it is much easier for the family and kid to deal with the situations. This led to many other videos, wider audiences and much more donations which was obviously destined to make sure that more and more people understood about the situation. Eventually, last year, we made a short race of 5k, 10k for autism kids and supporters because of the success that we received from that second video in which we used storytelling as a tool that made Ryan´s dream of having an autism foundation come true and eventually helping the cause as much as he could.


Challenge My cousin 's husband just recently started an autism foundation that started because his youngest son has autism . This disorder basically makes people have a hard time with social behavior , public speaking , communication among others . There is a very wide range of effects that autism might have with people . Before he approached me , I knew that autism existed , but I was not aware of the hard effects it had on people nor did I know the struggles that a kid might go through and a family as well . He was having a hard time receiving donations as he was not familiarized with social networks which was where he had his foundation . Even though there was a lot of content in his foundation page , we never got to the amount of donations that we were looking for and that made him become less motivated even though he knew the problems that his kid went through and wanted to help the cause . Selection When he contacted me for help , we decided that the best thing to do is to make people understand the situation that people with autism face and how they affect their families as well . This is when we decided that the storytelling tool was going to be our way to go hoping for people to understand reality and help the cause Approach The first story that we decided to film was a short 5 - minute video of Ryan talking about how he feels when he sees his kid suffer . With this video we invested some of our donation money into ads in Facebook so that we could reach a higher number of people and our foundation could become bigger and eventually reach our goal . We later found out that there are very few people that watch the whole 5 - minute video of a 40 - year - old man speaking to the camera and our mission was not successful . For our second approach , we decided to include Joey , the young kid with autism in the video . This was a much bigger investment , almost all the donations that our family had given to the foundation and this video was specially produced by a short clip company . This is where we reached our goal as the video was a storytelling of a day in Joey´s life and how autism affects him . By seeing the young kid struggle in a very well - made clip , it reached more people ’s feelings and that eventually lead to the foundation growing . Insight and Approach The amount of people that were touched by the video and the number of users that spoke to us saying that they never knew this was such a problem was huge . In a topic that is very sensitive such as autism , it is important to make people understand that this is something that might affect anyone and if treated with time , special teachers , it is much easier for the family and kid to deal with the situations . This led to many other videos , wider audiences and much more donations which was obviously destined to make sure that more and more people understood about the situation . Eventually , last year , we made a short race of 5k , 10k for autism kids and supporters because of the success that we received from that second video in which we used storytelling as a tool that made Ryan´s dream of having an autism foundation come true and eventually helping the cause as much as he could .