Goodwill year-in-review video 

At the end of the year, Facebook creates a year-in-review video, so people can take a look back at their year. Facebook’s intent is to give a gift to its users, and ideally raise sentiment. 

But everyone’s year is a little different, and some people may look back at the last twelve months at the worst in their lives. So how do we create a template to hold user-generated content that’s meaningful and evocative, without running the risk of framing bad memories in the wrong tone?

With this project, I worked with the internal creative studio to add guardrails to creative executions, to make sure the illustrations and framing of content would work for all kinds of images. While initial executions were much more celebratory, I effected a tonal shift in the work. While still inspiring and uplifting, the video still left room to hold more somber moments. 

This is one of those projects that best illustrate the non-writing aspect of Content Strategy. Solving for tone and edge cases, advocating for every experience, conducting empathy at scale. In fact, you’ll find the video has few words at all, and most of them are factual (Friends made: 28). The endline also is about being reflective and respectful. It worked for all cases, without being too generic as to lose sentiment at all: 

“Sometimes, looking back helps us remember what matters most.”

Impact of this work
Reached 2.1B people. Stat-sig improvement of top-line sentiment metrics.