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Stacy’s Pita Chips: The Making of Rise
The Stacy’s Rise Project – a program run by Stacy’s Pita Chips – seeks to combat the vast disparity in venture capital funding for women business founders. In 2022, Stacy’s decided the Rise story needed to reach a wider audience and partnered with award-winning filmmaker Nisha Ganatra to create a documentary. As Stacy’s PR agency, we had to develop a powerful behind-the-scenes film that would tease the documentary’s release while encouraging applications to the program.
Women business founders receive only 3% of VC funding despite their average ROI being twice per dollar invested.
The Campaign
We sought to create a video that would showcase how winning a Stacy’s Rise grant has profoundly changed the lives of three extraordinary Rise winners. For filming, we used a small crew and a one-day shoot per subject, on-location, at three different sites in California, over two months. We only had 20 minutes to film each interview, including location scouting, seating and light set-up, since our protagonists were also being filmed all day for the main documentary.
We would showcase the Making of Rise on the brand’s campaign website and across Stacy’s social media channels. The behind-the-scenes film would serve as a centerpiece that would drive earned media outreach across a vast array of verticals, including food, lifestyle, business, entertainment and advertising/marketing. Everything had to be ready to run on all channels in tandem with the announcement of the 2023 Stacy’s Rise Project to help generate program awareness and applications from women founders.
The Results
Not only did we meet our deadline, but we surpassed every performance metric. In total, the Making of Rise earned over 621.4 million impressions. It was featured in more than 1,400 stories because of our targeted media outreach – and a highly effective vehicle in generating maximum exposure and interest in the full-length documentary. The behind-the-scenes video was picked up in national outlets, including Yahoo! Finance and Market Watch, and high-reaching local outlets like the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune.
More importantly, the Stacy’s Rise Project received the most applications in the program’s history – 9,000 (up from 8,000 the year prior.) Meanwhile, the documentary continues to air at popular film festivals this year, fueling awareness and appreciation for the Stacy’s Rise Project and the inestimable difference it makes for struggling women founders.
