To do more meaningful work, Rigaud eventually joined with Eric Liley — a marketing veteran of Gannett, Showtime, and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America — to launch Buoyant Partners, a multicultural marketing and communications firm. The two men and their team work for such big companies as Comcast, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic. In the nonprofit world, the firm counts AARP, the NAACP, and Share Our Strength among its clients.
Buoyant ran its first racial-equity campaign in 2016, when the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers commissioned it to tell the story of “Putting Racism on the Table,” a series of sessions in which D.C. area nonprofit leaders grappled with ideas regarding white privilege, implicit bias, and philanthropy’s role addressing racism. Rigaud and Liley aimed to create visually driven stories with the punch and sophistication of Fortune 500 marketing, but they discovered storytelling for nonprofits required more to achieve the same result. Preproduction interviews became long, very personal conversations. For the leaders, Rigaud realized, the equity work was not simply another priority item in a strategic plan. “They saw it as something that has to be baked into the DNA of all the work for it to stick,” he says. “It has to be more than just something done externally. You have to do the internal work.”
The resulting video interviews with the leaders and experts at their session, while intended solely for members of the Washington group, went viral in the philanthropy world. Soon, Buoyant was documenting the equity journeys of other leaders, including for the United Philanthropy Forum. Rigaud and his team even documented meetings in which staff and leaders were wrestling with big issues and emotions.
Philanthropy had arrived at a racial reckoning earlier than the rest of the country, Rigaud says. “And we had a chance to have cameras rolling while all of that was happening.”
In subsequent efforts, Buoyant dug deeper still. With ABFE, formerly known as the Association of Black Foundation Executives, Rigaud made a point to tell the story of how the organization was born in part from a moment of protest in 1971, when the handful of Black attendees at a Council on Foundations meeting challenged a board-nomination process because there was no Black representation on the candidate slate.
Nuanced, thoughtful storytelling doesn’t have to be long, Rigaud says. Every campaign should include short social-media teasers. Tracking engagement online, Buoyant creates digital “journey maps,” one of Rigaud’s specialties at Procter & Gamble. The analysis answers questions such as: Who clicked? How did they find the content? How deeply did they dig into our story? Did they tell others about it?
Such analysis is important to determine whether anyone heard the proverbial tree that fell in the forest, he says. But that’s not enough. With today’s technology, he says, you can learn a lot about who was in the forest that day, their emotions when the tree fell, and whether anyone tried to move it. Those insights drive effective marketing, whether you’re selling soap or promoting equity.
Marcus Walton, CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, talks about racial equity as part of a video series that Buoyant Partners produced to introduce Walton as the organization’s new leader.
