Envision
Communication and Media
Envision
Communication and Media
Every organization has a few communications that are not merely strategic, but foundational. If those communications fall short, the results will be lackluster at best, and often confusing. These communications become pivotal in the life of an organization, and therefore deserve special attention.
Envision works with you, side by side as skilled collaborators rather than experts with answers. Together, we work to ensure clarity about your highest goals—the world you’re helping to create—and your role in bringing it about. It’s essential that this vision be clear, well-understood, and shared within your team. Then, with an understanding of your stakeholders and how you’ll reach them, we craft your story so they’ll feel, remember, and be compelled by it.
With experience in journalism, television news production, documentary production, educational program design, exhibit development, and case-writing for fundraising, we know that effective story-telling produces impact. We’re resourceful and efficient; as experienced producers with several careers under our belts, we’re able to distinguish between production value that increases impact from wasted investment. As curious outsiders bringing leadership, strategy, and fund-raising experience, we’ll ask the questions and apply the skills needed to ensure that your story is complete, focused and effective.
Our Story
A powerful collaboration was born when David Rabkin and Diane Sherlock were thrown together by chance as volunteers assisting Together for 2020, a grassroots, Massachusetts-based, election-year project. Their work helped the group—a multi-organization partnership, volunteer recruiting effort, and activist opportunity clearinghouse all rolled up into one—to articulate and effectively communicate its mission to reclaim the White House, flip the Senate, hold the House, and restore our democracy. The media and messages David and Diane created helped T2020 recruit over 10,000 volunteers for activism in battleground states across the U.S.
Now, synergizing their professional interests, expertise, and talents through Envision, David and Diane focus on high-impact storytelling to advance the work of public leaders, political initiatives, and nonprofit organizations. Their approach begins with deep listening, clear articulation of purpose, and consensus-building. Only then do they move forward, creating individual, original, innovative multimedia stories, which are grounded in purpose and designed to reach both long-time stakeholders and new, diverse, wide-ranging target audiences. In every field, no matter what the subject, Diane’s and David’s Envision goal is to inform and engage, to move all audiences from curiosity and interest to engagement and commitment.
Diane Sherlock
DIANE SHERLOCK is an award-winning television producer and an accomplished communications and editorial director. With a strong background in journalism, Diane began her career as an on-air news reporter before moving on to produce public affairs programming at such stations as WGBH for PBS and WCVB-TV. At Harvard, where Diane earned both her BA and her EdM, she was a development communications director and editor of two alumni magazines. Since 2009, Diane’s work has focused on the world of education, where she has served as editorial director of the National Center on Time and Learning, communications and recruitment director for Cambridge School Volunteers, and a strategic communications consultant to Emerson College, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, specializing in the creation of “case studies.” Diane has been a member of several educational and arts boards and has produced political media, events, and activist endeavors at the local, regional, and national levels. The author of a cookbook published by Doubleday, Diane is also a certified mediator and has practiced in the district courts and, alongside its chief New England mediator, at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Her professional passion is for finding and telling the stories that deserve to be told, to advance nonprofits and transform individual lives.
David Rabkin
DAVID RABKIN’s experience spans two careers—in software and museums. He has designed and developed systems for project management, factory scheduling, and real-time production control, and served in roles from systems engineer to divisional director and vice president. David completed a PhD in technology and innovation management at MIT, and in 2000 was able to combine his interests in organization and technology by joining Boston’s Museum of Science as a vice president focused on transforming the Museum into a 21st-century institution addressing technology and its impact, as well as science. That role, board-level involvement with not-for-profit educational and arts organizations, and more than a decade of service to the City of Cambridge as a climate advisor, have demonstrated and reinforced David’s commitment to mission-focused organizations and causes. He has created, and led production of, hundreds of programs, dialogues, and events, science and art exhibits, and a wide range of media—from posters on local public transit to award-winning immersive films screened in planetariums globally. In 2020, David immersed himself in the election, applying his management, creative, and technical skills to the challenge of volunteer recruiting and deployment. Currently, David’s focus is on causes and organizations that help strengthen democracy and help develop our society’s ability to employ critical thinking in the quest to mitigate, or better yet eliminate, humanity’s negative impacts on climate, justice, and the pursuit – and appropriate application – of scientific knowledge.
Portfolio
Diane and David became a team while helping Together for 2020, a new kind of clearinghouse to connect volunteers to progressive organizations working on the 2020 election. In an effort to articulate and communicate the organization’s mission, and to support recruiting and partner formation, we developed presentations, supported website redesign, and produced a range of videos from short social media pieces to longer works. Below, we present several of our works that contributed to Togther for 2020’s success in recruiting over 10,000 unique individual volunteers*.
Identity
Our first challenge was helping Together for 2020’s leaders explain the effort. The messaging was complex, including emotional appeals and complex factual information. We developed the approach to the presentation, produced the slide deck and produced this video, to provide an effective communication tool for use in meetings and on the web.
Zeitgeist
Social media demanded a shift the group’s emphasis — from the factual (reasons why electing Democrats was important) to include emotional elements (Together for 2020 as an antidote to the way people were feeling). It had to be short, and produced very rapidly. We recommended and produced versions in English and Spanish.
Leadership
Leadership makes a difference, but how can you convey the powerful ideas in a leader’s – lengthy – remarks in less than a minute? How can you use those words to motivate people when all you’ve got is audio from a Zoom call with postage-stamp sized video?
Participation
What’s it like to participate? This video captured the experience of participants in an event that combined fun and effectiveness. The challenge was capturing in video the feel of the the event, its arc and building sense of accomplishment and excitement while using only the Zoom recording. This task involved both a 4-mintue piece and a one-minute version for use in social media.
*We often faced constraints in language or graphics. For example, for this [terrific] event, the name and graphics were developed by others.
Pride
On January 20, 2021, the night of the inauguration, Together for 2020 threw a party. Despite the events of January 6 and the threats still facing our democracy, we needed to say thank you to our thousands of volunteers by telling our shared story and to ensure that everyone realized just how much we had done and magnitude of our contributions. It was a moment to to stop, soak it up, and feel proud.