Extreme Weather Survivors
Our Challenge
Make extreme weather impossible to ignore for those who tune out climate politics, for skeptics who distrust it, and for the lawmakers who can act on it - all without setting off the polarization that ends the conversation.
Impact
Engagement rates of 11.3% - nearly double standard benchmarks
1.5M+ impressions in California’s top political news outlets
Nearly 1M views of survivor-centered content on social media
Our Work
Creator Programs
Survivors are the most credible messengers on extreme weather. Creators are the most trusted voices in their communities. Novel puts the two together, and handles everything behind it: sourcing and vetting, message. design & briefing, contracting and content review.
Survivor Storytelling Cohort: A standing group of creators, some of them survivors themselves, who bring extreme weather stories to their audiences in their own voice. Creators who haven’t lived through a disaster sit down with survivors and shape the story with them. The cohort runs on a monthly rhythm and can move fast when the next storm, fire or flood hits.
Targeted Campaigns: Focused creator pushes behind a single topic or state. Southern moms asked their followers how the weather feels different. Commentators and educators unpacked whether Big Oil knew. Each campaign reached a new audience without the climate fight getting in the way.
Content Production
Nobody wants a climate lecture, so we lead with questions, not arguments. For family-focused, apolitical audiences, the question was “How does the weather feel different to you?” It invited people to share what they’d seen instead of arguing about it. For skeptical, conspiracy-curious audiences, it was “Did Big Oil know the risks to our climate?” That turned climate into a corporate cover-up worth investigating, backed by internal memos and hard evidence.
Two different audiences came to the same conclusion. A mom in Arizona noticing her summers feel hotter and a skeptic digging through oil company memos both end up in the same place: the weather is getting more extreme, and it isn’t an accident. We don’t change the core message for each audience. We change the way in - so it reaches people where they already are.
Media Buying & Campaign Strategy
Survivor stories only change policy if the people writing it hear them. So we built a two-phase campaign around one key moment: the California Democratic Convention. The goal was “surround sound,” with policymakers running into EWS’s message on the street, on their phones and on their screens, all at the same time.
During the convention, survivor stories were everywhere attendees turned. They were projected onto buildings, carried past on mobile billboards, and served to phones through geofencing inside the venue and around the complex. Our targeting went beyond legislators to reach the whole network around them: staff, political insiders and the policy influencers whose opinions lawmakers trust.
The second phase kept up the pressure after the convention. As lawmakers returned to Sacramento, a targeted buy across connected TV, programmatic display and California’s top political news outlets followed them home. That kept survivor stories in front of decision-makers long after the convention ended.
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