social-impact
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HelloWorld takes study abroad down the street
An Okinawa company pairs Japanese students with international neighbors and classrooms overseas. Its bet: the distance to a different life can be much shorter than a plane ride.
SMALL makes the idea the main event
A T-shirt that comes with a condo. A film that turns low expectations inside out. Inside the New York agency built around a simple proposition: hire the people with the idea.
Televerde puts a second chance on the sales line.
The B2B sales company trains incarcerated women to win customers for enterprise clients. Its more interesting product may be the career that survives the prison gate.
A$20,000. No equity. A room full of people who ask difficult questions.
Melbourne Accelerator Program gives selected startups cash, coaching and a place to work without taking a stake. The more interesting bargain is what founders owe the community afterwards.
Feira Preta built a market. Then it had to build the machinery.
A São Paulo fair became a network for Black entrepreneurs, linking training, creative spaces and customers. Its most revealing lessons arrived when the festival could no longer pay its own way.
IIM Udaipur Incubation Centre backs the work before the first sale
A recycled brick needs machinery, tests and a willing buyer. In Udaipur, a nonprofit incubator helps founders work through those unglamorous steps - with management expertise, public funding routes and introductions that matter.
iHUB Nairobi: The business of making luck
A foosball table could introduce two founders. Keeping the doors open required a business model. Inside the Nairobi hub that learned to put a price, a partner and a pilot behind a promising idea.
Thrive Causemetics and the $25,000 eyeliner that took its time
Before the teal mascara became familiar, Karissa Bodnar had an apartment full of eyeliner and dwindling savings. Her beauty business grew by solving a small, stubborn problem - then giving each sale a second purpose.
60 Decibels asks the people your impact report forgot
A solar panel sold is easy to count. A customer helped is harder. 60 Decibels turns short conversations into evidence that investors and businesses can actually use.
The $5 Promise That Made Healthcare Personal
Watsi turned a stranger's plea on a Costa Rican bus into a radically legible way to fund surgery. The elegant part is the $5 donation; the hard part is everything that must happen behind it.
The Miami Agency That Stopped Translating America
Republica Havas built a business around a simple correction: people do not become generic consumers when they see an ad. Its journey from two founders over coffee to Havas's cross-cultural flagship shows what happens when culture moves from the footnote to the brief.
Sunshine Sachs Morgan & Lylis Built an Empire by Staying Out of the Picture
For three decades, the communications firm treated its own invisibility as proof of competence. Then the media changed, two operators joined the marquee, and even the people behind the curtain decided it was time to be seen.
The Agency That Learned to Work From 23 Feet of Aluminum
Publicity For Good grew up in an Airstream, survived a one-day revenue collapse, and turned purpose-driven PR into a production system measured in placements, podcasts, and proof.
The Agency That Put a Stopwatch on Stigma
Red Rock sells branding, but its most revealing metric is time: a mental-health campaign was associated with cutting the average delay before treatment from 15.5 months to 6.3. The story is what happened when an agency treated communication as part of the care pathway.
Latitude Gave Half Away. Then It Lost Almost Everything.
A Minneapolis creative agency made generosity a fixed cost of doing business. When the pandemic erased 90% of revenue in a week, the rule looked reckless - until it became the reason to rebuild.
Revolt Found the Cost of Silence
Most agencies sell attention. Revolt sells the harder thing that must come first: a reason to deserve it. Its merger with Anthesis turned that argument into a business built from science, strategy and public action.
The Firm Behind the People Behind the Policy
Freedman Consulting sells something Washington rarely puts on an invoice: the patient work of getting foundations, governments, and advocates to move in the same direction.
The Agency That Made Chicken Hygiene Watchable
Public-health information usually arrives wearing sensible shoes. Banyan Communications gives it a plot, a punchline, and a reason to be remembered.
Changing Our World Works Both Sides of the Giving Table
The New York consultancy has spent 27 years translating between donors, companies and institutions. Its real product is not generosity. It is alignment.
The League Found the Voters Hiding in Plain Sight
The League treats culture as civic infrastructure. Its wager is simple: the right storyteller can make a court race, a care-work policy or a documentary feel less like homework and more like something worth passing along.
Baobab Consulting Put the Room on Trial
A firm born in Senegal before remote work became fashionable discovered that the real communications problem was rarely the press release. It was who got into the room, who understood the room, and whether the room had to exist at all.
The Agency That Survived Its Own First Idea
Identika started with RFID, failed fast, kept the name, and found its real business in messages that have to work across languages, platforms and public skepticism.
The Ad Agency That Put Naloxone on the Guest List
Amélie Company sells behavior change, not breakfast cereal. Its best campaigns begin where ordinary advertising gets uncomfortable - addiction, overdose, mental health - and end with something people can actually use.
Legacy Direct Put a Number on an Athlete's Good Name
The 2008 sports startup scored reputations, gave away a three-year plan, and asked sponsors to pay for the follow-through. Its most revealing product was not a dashboard - it was a new answer to who gets to build a legacy.
Purpose Worldwide Sells the Sentence Before the Story
The Austin firm treats public relations as a business system, not a press-release factory - joining purpose, positioning and measurable growth before anyone asks for coverage.
The People You Call When the Plan Meets the Crowd
DigiGeeks Collective sells something more useful than another campaign deck: a trusted bench of specialists that can appear when a mission-driven team suddenly needs more hands, more range, or both.
The Agency That Put a Three-Eyed Alien to Work for New Mexico
MediaDesk discovered that public information travels farther when it stops looking like public information. Its proof is an Emmy-winning alien, a water campaign with 1.5 million views, and a business built for clients whose hardest product to sell is participation.
The Machine Got the Culture Wrong. So Better Together Built Its Own.
A Washington communications shop encountered a small machine error with a large human meaning. The mistake became a research program, then a product - and a useful lesson in what AI still cannot be trusted to understand alone.
The Marketing Agency That Spent a Decade Hiding in Plain Sight
Parklife started as freelance copywriting, stayed a side hustle for roughly a decade, and then did something awkwardly useful: it applied its own brand advice to itself. The result is a distributed agency built for clients whose ideas do not fit neatly inside an agency brief.
The Two-Year Pitch: How Wasabi Publicity Makes Experts Useful Before Famous
A North Carolina PR shop built a virtual team before remote work had a name. Its enduring product is not fame on demand, but a disciplined way to be useful when the news cycle comes knocking.