Embedded Files
Case Study 1
The Situation
In 2021, Lenovo found Island Conservation while searching for one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth. That wasn't luck. It was the result of an SEO and original content strategy I'd built for the organization over the previous years, one that made a small conservation nonprofit rank for exactly the kind of search a tech company doing an ambitious remote-work campaign would run.
Our Innovation Director got the first call. I was pulled in shortly after. Lenovo's pitch: recruit skilled professionals from around the world to spend a month working remotely from Robinson Crusoe Island, off the coast of Chile, while installing the connectivity to make it possible.
It was a good idea on paper. It was also the kind of project that could go badly wrong.
My Role
and the Concerns I Raised
Island Conservation had spent over a decade earning the trust of the Robinson Crusoe community. Isolation had made residents understandably wary of outsiders, especially anyone arriving from "the continent" with a big plan and a bigger marketing budget. Before I'd agree to anything, I needed three things settled.
The project had to leave something behind, not just extract a good story and disappear. Locals needed a real seat in the decision-making, not a courtesy consultation. And the volunteers selected had to actually have skills the community could use, not just resumes that looked good in a press release.
I became the direct communications bridge to the island's mayor, who didn't speak English. Every one of those conversations happened in Spanish, and every commitment Lenovo made had to survive translation into something the community could actually hold them to.
Building it
Once terms were set, Lenovo ran the marketing engine and handled the bulk of applicant screening. More than 4,000 people applied, from the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, France, the UK, Japan, Italy, and Germany. Lenovo narrowed that down to 60 finalists based on our criteria.
I interviewed all 60 myself. Each candidate came with a psychological evaluation from a project psychologist, which I studied before ever getting on a call with them. I was screening for five things: psychological fit for a month of isolation, skills that actually transferred to the island's needs, cultural awareness, language ability, and prior experience working across cultures. Sixteen were selected.
When Lenovo drafted the announcement materials, I edited every version. My main job there wasn't polish, it was tone: making sure Lenovo didn't come across as the hero arriving to save a struggling community, which is the easiest trap for a campaign like this to fall into.
In our weekly calls with Lenovo, I pushed for one thing specifically: a $100,000 fund to sustain the technology infrastructure after the volunteers and the cameras went home. That was the difference between a campaign and a legacy, and it wasn't something Lenovo had offered up front.
What Went Sideways
The community changed its mind more than once, which meant we improvised more than once. Three weeks before the volunteers landed, we'd already cleaned, wired, branded, and outfitted an unused building as the technology hub, with the community's blessing. Then the community decided they wanted the space back for Zumba classes. That took real diplomacy to resolve without souring the relationship we'd spent a decade building, and it's the kind of problem no campaign timeline accounts for.
On my end, the harder challenge was simpler and less glamorous: running this at full intensity, content creation, social coordination, weekly Lenovo meetings, daily earned-media tracking, on top of my regular Island Conservation workload. Earned media specifically mattered more than people outside the nonprofit world tend to realize. For an NGO, press coverage isn't vanity, it's how you prove your mission is credible enough to keep funding. I tracked, archived, and repurposed every mention myself, every day, for the life of the campaign.
What it Delivered
Within six months, Robinson Crusoe went from roughly 1 Mbps to broadband-level connectivity, a jump the island's own residents described as a decade of technological progress compressed into one month. Close to a third of the island's population used the new tech hub. And Lenovo's AI server, installed as part of the project, let our field team analyze camera-trap images for invasive species in hours instead of months, a direct conservation win that outlasted the marketing campaign entirely.
The broader campaign reached 3.6 billion earned media impressions across 2,000+ pieces of coverage, and it won a Shorty Impact Award in 2022.
Extending the Partnership
Most brand campaigns end when the press cycle does. This one didn't, and that's largely because the relationship it was built on was real rather than transactional. Lenovo stayed engaged with Island Conservation well past the campaign's official close, running a follow-up feature built around our Innovation Director, continuing to apply their technology to our conservation work elsewhere, and using the project as a case study in their own conferences, videos, and advertising. Every one of those extensions meant a new audience learning about Island Conservation's mission, at zero additional campaign cost.
I stayed involved across three follow-up video projects that came out of that extended relationship:
Video 1 - Summit feature:
"Delivering Edge Computing at the Remotest Island in the World to Preserve Biodiversity." I worked with the interviewers beforehand to build the conversation framework, making sure the discussion stayed organic rather than scripted while still hitting the points that mattered to Island Conservation.
Video 2 - Technology-in-Conservation Feature.
Made after the campaign, this video looked at how Lenovo's technology was being used in our conservation work more broadly, tied back to the Work for Humankind story. I was on-site during filming, fact-checking in real time and supporting my colleague David Will to make sure the technical answers he gave on camera were accurate, and guiding the production on Island Conservation's talking points generally.
Video 3 - Award-Winning Mini-Documentary.
I reviewed every draft for consistency with Island Conservation's messaging and for cultural appropriateness toward the Robinson Crusoe community, and wrote original content supporting its release, including this passage:
"What happens when one of the most remote places on Earth connects with the rest of the world? Island Conservation partnered with Lenovo and the community of Robinson Crusoe for the Work for Humankind project to find out."
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse