Responses by Katie Harrison, cofounder, and Lew Willig, executive creative director, Hive

Background: With COVID-19 intensifying the inequities facing women and girls in every country around the world, the need for equality has never been more urgent. Yet just 1.6 percent of all US philanthropic funds go to organizations fighting for equal rights for women and girls. Less than 0.5 percent of donations from foundations go to women and girls of color. Women Moving Millions seeks to address that funding gap and made its own bold commitment to mobilize $100 million in new philanthropic commitments to women and girls by 2022. We brought this vision to life, galvanizing the nonprofit organization’s members, prospects and partners to take action and help fulfill its vision for a gender equal world.

Reasoning: We cannot achieve equal rights without equal funding. We know—and research has demonstrated—that women have the imagination, the knowledge and the creativity to create a gender equal world. What they lack is equal access to resources and capital. We wanted to highlight this injustice in a bold way to prompt people to take action.

Challenges: Balancing the need to highlight the maddening injustice of gender inequality and the gravity of the issues, while still promoting that change is possible. The video’s ending highlights leaders in the equality movement, giving the story an arc and leaving viewers on a high inspiring note to encourage them to take action.

Favorite details: Our ability to honor those impacted by inequality every day and pay homage to the activists on the frontlines of change. We wanted to showcase the activism and the trailblazers driving progress every day, both unsung heroes and well known voices.

Visual influences: Because each issue is complex and multifaceted, we looked to fine art and editorial collage work, not only as a way to combine multiple photographs into a solitary image for an artistic effect, but also for reference on color, texture and the integration of hand-painted elements. The overall goal was to get to a solution that could present both the positive and negative elements of the one-minute video in a way that was more surprising, artful and engaging than your typical montage.

Specific demands: Pulling together everything at the same time—developing the painterly transition technique as we were building the collages, with help from Lobo, and conducting image searches—proved to be more challenging than we’d anticipated, especially given the amount of license negotiation that had to happen with our limited time and budget.

ahive.com