We developed an original narrative campaign and complementary materials to help Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette communicate directly with its most engaged donors — providing life-changing programs with critically needed support.
With Roe v Wade no longer enshrined, 2025 brought an unprecedented barrage on comprehensive reproductive healthcare across the country. People lost access to vital cancer screenings, contraception, infection treatment and abortion services that they depend on.
In these critical moments, the stories we tell become even more important.
PPCW came to Human Centric Media wanting to highlight the remarkable resilience and interpersonal talent of its team, and the culture of care they’ve spent years building together.
Preparation is Key
Approaching subjects with reverence is not just an interview tool, it’s integral to how we prepare for a project. The campaigns we develop depend on extensive empathetic research — we spoke to multiple members of the PPCW team before ever setting foot on-site.
What this preparation revealed was their team’s deep commitment to the patients they serve: from their clinics to the back office, everyone plays a role in holding the line.
In our pre-interviews, we spoke to multiple PPCW team members who had spent more than a decade with the organization. It became clear that these bonds, shared between compatriots in the fight for reproductive healthcare access, would serve as the perfect emotional anchor for our campaign.
Putting Down the Script
When people are providing critical services, they’re fully occupied with the operational responsibilities of keeping experiences consistent and lights on. Storytelling is a distant afterthought.
Lots of communications departments, tasked with this balancing act, rely on committee-calculated talking points and extensive scripting to guarantee that narratives are on-brand and corporate compliant.
The problem with this approach comes down to audience temperament: the internet has trained millions of people to ignore corporate bloviating, insincerity and boilerplate communications objectives. They want people to be real with them — drop the script, speak from the heart and mean it.
Building the Container
Human Centric Media is built on a journalistic methodology and the belief that true stories are far more powerful than anything we could script.
Our narrative development requires meaningful investment in relationships — we met with PPCW’s Chief Development Officer Scott Palmer, Chief Medical Operating Officer Dr. Kate Shaw and CEO Dr. Sara Kennedy with the benefit of our research but without preconceived notions of what they needed to say.
Each subject was greeted with open, experiential questions about what makes them so passionate about the work. Given this space, they each shared deeply personal anecdotes about their lives, careers and relationships. Powering it all was a shared commitment to each other’s excellence.
This openness is what makes the resulting materials — a video campaign spotlighting PPCW’s culture and emphasizing recruitment, and complementary materials for internal donor communications — shine with an unfakeable authenticity. Online, the subjects read as real people. Not robots, not actors. Peers.
That’s how you build a trusting relationship. It starts with the truth. When times get tough, it can be hard to keep your storytelling honest. That’s why Human Centric Media has built a process with ample room for genuine expression. We’ll hold that down while you provide the critical services.
Are you being real with your audience? It makes all the difference in the world.
