📌 Project Overview

Project: Ashes to Films — Featured Filmmakers Series
Role: Content Strategist / Creative Lead
Platform: Instagram
Focus: Brand storytelling, audience growth, mission alignment

🔍 The Challenge

Ashes to Films supports filmmakers impacted by the LA wildfires, but its social presence leaned heavily on organizational announcements and fundraising appeals. While important, this approach limited engagement and didn’t fully reflect the emotional core of the organization: artists rebuilding their lives and creative work after loss.

At the same time, Instagram audiences already engaging with wildfire coverage and the film community were primed for more personal, human stories — not institutional messaging.

🎯 The Strategy

I proposed shifting Ashes to Films’ Instagram content from organizational voice to first-person storytelling by centering grantee directors as narrators of their own experiences

The strategy focused on:

• Using first-person stories to create emotional resonance and trust

• Positioning Ashes to Films as a conduit for storytelling rather than the protagonist

• Designing posts native to Instagram’s consumption patterns: concise, intimate, and visually grounded

• Attracting audiences already interested in the LA fires and independent film through shared themes of loss, recovery, and creativity

🛠️ Execution

• Developed a recurring Instagram series featuring grantee directors telling personal stories in their own voice

• Conducted interviews, edited and shaped first-person narratives to preserve authenticity while improving clarity and emotional pacing

• Paired stories with intimate, personal portraits of the filmmaker

• Established a content framework that could scale beyond the initial series without reverting to institutional messaging

📈 Results & Impact

• Helped Ashes to Films begin shifting its social presence from promotion-driven posts to story-led brand building

• Increased engagement by centering lived experience rather than organizational explanation

• Strengthened alignment between the organization’s mission and how it showed up publicly

• Created a repeatable model for mission-driven storytelling putting recipients at the center of the narrative, not the institution