Creative agency Camino uses hope as a communications strategy to help clients tell human-centric stories and drive social impact in Latin America 📍 Colombia

What if creative agencies could inspire action through more human stories?

Camino, a creative agency for social change, integrated hope-based communications into its strategy to amplify social impact for its clients across Latin America. By moving away from traditional, problem-focused narratives, Camino developed innovative and engaging campaigns that highlighted solutions and human stories which has set a new standard for social impact projects and results.

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Many social change organizations rely on creative agencies to help them get their message across. These agencies are often tasked with the difficult job of translating complex social issues into engaging campaigns that not only capture public attention but drive action. And without a new framework or push for innovation in these strategies, many campaigns end up reinforcing fear-based messaging.  

Camino, a creative agency for social change based in Bogota, works with clients around Latin America. Over the last 4 years, their projects have reached over 40 million people in 10 countries in Latin America. Like many agencies, they consistently face the challenge of creating meaningful impact with short-term projects that can drive long-term sustainable change.

Laura Sandoval, Editor-in-Chief at Camino, has had her own concerns about how traditional communications work in social change. She found that many creative agencies and communicators adhere to a familiar structure: “there’s the easy way to do it, the way that we all know: here’s the context, here’s the problem, and here are all our demands.” 

Upon joining Camino and learning about hope-based communications, Laura found a new way to do things. “I was already a hopeful person,” she says. “I had this intuition that we need to change the way that traditional communications talks about social impact topics—to focus not only on the bad parts but the good—but I never considered the concept of ‘hope’ as a communication strategy. 

“Throughout the course of the [hope-based communication] workshop, I realized that this wasn’t only my intuition, but this was a strategy. A strategy with some pretty good arguments for it.”

Traditional methods of social impact communications often focus heavily on the issues people face and deficits in our society. But this can overwhelm the audience and fail to inspire action, she points out. Laura’s previous experience in an advertising agency emphasized this approach, where audiences were seen as demographics and numbers rather than individuals with emotions and experiences.  “Now, it’s more important to think about audience emotions, life experiences, and beliefs. We see audiences and messages as humans,” she says.

“This new hope-based methodology has helped us to challenge the status quo and how we do creative projects. With this [hope-based] strategy, we have an innovative approach to how to communicate in a different way. It has helped us do things differently,” Laura notes.

The adoption of a hope-based approach marked a significant shift in Camino’s overall strategy and how they worked with clients. Camino's new approach encourages questioning norms that the agency took for granted before the hope-based training, which has led to more inventive and unique solutions for them and their clients. For her and for Camino, it has been an exciting creative challenge to find new ways to communicate after the hope-based training. 

As a creative agency, Camino works with social impact organizations on campaigns of varying sizes and goals. One project that Camino has worked on for their social impact client Puentes is Inspiratorio, a training space for Latin American organizations and activists to exercise their ‘narrative power.’ Inspiratorio offers online courses with different modules like ‘Creating narratives to change history’ and ‘Turning the apocalypse into hope.’

Other projects that Camino has worked on include the widely successful Familias: Ahora platform which challenges commonly held narratives around family structures in latin America (🔗 hope-based case study) and the project Presentes which infuses human-centric stories into informative and educational content about environmental justice (🔗 hope-based case study).

Now, their narrative change work is something that Camino is well known for and which clients approach the agency specifically for. However, it hasn’t always been easy to convince clients about the hope-based approach: “A common concern is that hope can turn into toxic positivity,” shares Laura.

“In Latin America, there are a lot of struggles, a lot of demands, and a lot of causes that need support. Some people worry that implementing a hopeful strategy will erase the histories and suffering that people face. But we explain that our approach focuses more on the people who are in the communities, how they are doing. We share stories of hope and new beginnings, and that helps inspire you to find a way, to create an agenda.”

The hope-based approach can be a powerful tool for creative agencies, organizations, and activists worldwide, because “it can really change the way that they communicate,” says Laura.

By moving away from shorter-term problem-centric campaigns, Camino now helps organizations achieve deeper, more meaningful narrative change and inspire action among audiences. 

“[Hope] is something I strongly believe in. You need to stay hopeful. Our world has a lot of grief, and if you can find a way to find hope these days, you should hug it. I’m really convinced this is the way.”

The implementation of a hope-based approach has not only enhanced Camino's creative process but also set a new standard for how they approach social impact projects. This change not only helps the agency to spread awareness about topics, but also increases action and behavior change. By underpinning their agency’s strategies with the hope-based approach, Camino has found a powerful tool for organizations and activists worldwide.