Starbucks kicked off its Upstanders campaign with Upworthy as its exclusive launch partner in 2016 and worked with us again in 2017. During my time at Upworthy, I was a senior creative strategist on this series in collaboration with our production team. In addition to narrative development, I also oversaw optimization of social cuts of these videos on Upworthy’s social channels.

This Shorty Award-winning 11-part series focused on inspiring stories of ordinary people making extraordinary changes in their communities. Our shared goal was to elevate the national conversation about sensitive topics like the opioid crisis, race, refugees in America, and poverty, to shine a light on the bigger American story, where ordinary people put aside differences to come together. During our 8-week flight, Upworthy’s social optimization efforts drove over 30.2MM views and over 1MM engagements, a large portion of which were organic across disparate audiences.

The Emotion Circumplex (diagram above) is a time-tested psychology framework to understand emotions and their correlation with action. When content elicits emotions that fall within the high arousal (exciting/controversial), positive valence (optimistic/loving/kind) quadrant, there’s a strong correlation with activation, which is a key factor in high social engagement.

In our political climate, content focusing on issues like refugee resettlement, race relations, the opioid crisis, etc. is often polarizing and alienating to large portions of digital audiences, and it generally does not achieve virality outside likeminded groups. Although this series dealt with divisive issues, highlighting positive themes like personal growth, friendship, forgiveness, compassion and ingenuity elicited a universally positive valence across disparate social groups. This positive valence paired with high arousal due to “controversial” themes led to high levels of engagement for the series.