Educating the public on FEMA’s life-saving mission through high-impact visual storytelling.

The American people expect a great deal from FEMA without fully understanding what the agency does and where lines of responsibility begin and end. The public is responsible for preparing themselves and their families for potential natural disasters. To do this, they can easily visit ready.gov, a government-supported website, for tips and educational materials. FEMA’s primary responsibility is to step in after a disaster. Because FEMA’s priority in times of crisis is to support survivors, providing clear messaging and establishing trust and credibility are vital to the agency’s success.

Through Bixal’s discovery process — a phase where teams conduct environmental scans, audience surveys and other research and discovery activities appropriate to a scope of work, given timeline and budget — our team learned that although FEMA has an extensive video library, the agency had difficulty creating consistency with the look, tone and feel of those videos and was struggling to create transparency and build brand trust through education and clear messaging. Some of the agency’s focus areas include providing public assistance programs to support communities in need, rebuilding infrastructure and roadways after disasters, funding grants for emergency response training and support, and keeping communities together.

We chose to use animation in this piece to allow our team to explore a rich visual branding experience while using repeatable storytelling approaches new to the FEMA video portfolio. Our team recognized that visual storytelling, a proven way to capture the attention of, and engage, key audiences, could be the perfect way to spread FEMA’s message and connect with the American public.

The Bixal team created both storytelling and multimedia templates for FEMA’s team to build on and ensure consistency with future use. We also aligned our project’s objectives with FEMA’s broader strategic communications goals to deliver a collection of videos that the FEMA team could integrate into ongoing marketing campaigns and relevant seasonal outreach (i.e., hurricane season). These videos now serve as a means for continued brand building and leverage other FEMA opportunities to promote greater agency awareness throughout the year.

“Building a Resilient Nation” is the first in a series of short-format multimedia video pieces the Bixal team conceived, developed, produced and delivered for FEMA. We used the video as an opportunity to share not only FEMA’s mission but also their 2018-2022 Strategic Plan.