Mailchimp Big Change Starts Small

2020

The Mailchimp approach to philanthropy is all about flipping the script. They’re not down with top down models, choosing instead to invest in bottom up. We partnered with the good people at Kin to explain—in the most surreal manner we could muster—how Mailchimp is putting the people who know their communities best in charge.

Changing Changers

Doing good is, well, good. A lot of large organizations are making a real and much-needed difference in the world. But big isn't always better, especially when it comes to who is making the changes that matter on a local level. Mailchimp puts resources into the hands of the people already doing the work in their communities. The reasoning is simple: They're already getting the job done, so just imagine what they could accomplish with a little extra help.

To craft our world of Small Changers, we brought our super-powered community leaders and their passions to life and put it all through a surreal lens. Then we paired them with a cast of equally oddball locals to see what kind of magic would spark.

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Process & Production

Part of why we love working with Mailchimp is the flexibility and looseness of the illustration we can employ. It’s not every job where we get to flaunt this kind of freedom and find our way through experimentation and trial and error.
Even though we used our earlier work with Mailchimp as a jumping off point, we used pretty much every tool in the box to define a style that is familiar, yet very specific to this neighborhood of changers. And while it feels very practical and sketch book-y, every frame was crafted in part by hand, mouse, pen, pencil, and stylus. And a final pass actually done by hand, of course.
After dozens of design explorations and iterations—only about a quarter of everything we made is used in the final film—we arrived somewhere as weird and wonderful as we wish we were. Fortunately some of what didn't make it into a finished frame is all around us ↑ ↓ ↙ ↖

Portal Illustration

After generating countless designs for animation, we just... kept going. Luckily, the momentum of our pens and pencils carried us through a series of illustrations for the Change The Changers portal. Folk from our animated film join new characters in a slew of editorial style pieces that cover a wide range of topics like housing advocacy groups, crisis response efforts, and voter engagement programs. (Note to self: Are trees allowed to vote?)