SUNDANCE COLLAB
creative challenge
The Sundance Institute has a 40+ year track record of supporting independent artists. Sundance Collab, the Institute’s online learning and community platform is the place where artists from around the world can hone their filmmaking skills. The hard part? Telling the world about us on a non-profit budget.
BEFORE
AFTER
solution
With its high return on investment, email was chosen to be our strategy to remind our 170,000+ members of our courses, events, and membership perks.
Keep the brand fresh in members' minds
Increase engagement
encourage social sharing
As lead of the Sundance Collab email program, I built a brand voice system designed to scale across a global, cross-functional team. The first priority was recalibrating the voice — moving from academic and insider-coded to warm, accessible, and internationally readable, so members from anywhere in the world felt genuinely welcomed. The second was developing the voice guidelines and editorial frameworks that would allow the broader team to apply it consistently — so the brand didn’t depend on any one writer to sound like itself. Visual identity was refreshed in parallel, moving from a heavy black-on-black template to something open and aligned with Institute branding.
results
Email open rates of 45% and up