A favorite documentary short from the Small Business Revolution, set in downtown Chicago and using black and white to step back in time.

When Fortune 1000 company Deluxe Corp. needed to pivot from the dinosaur business of paper checks toward their nascent practice in small business services, their CMO looked to storytelling for the answer. Executive Creative Director at Flow Nonfiction at the time, LAP founder David Modigliani pitched her on the Small Business Revolution – a campaign to tell 100 stories of small businesses across America and a media property to house them at www.smallbusinessrevolution.org.

In addition to documentary shorts, the strategy included developing a vibrant Instagram account from scratch by commissioning a few National Geographic photographers to capture images for digital photo essays the team created. The photographers posted to their own accounts and occasionally to the Nat Geo account, causing waterfalls of followers to gravitate to the @smallbusinessrevolution account, which now has more than 15,000 followers.

The integrated digital strategy around the campaign garnered more impressions than Deluxe could have imagined. As Chief Brand Officer Amanda Brinkman said, “We would have had to spend 11 times the amount in paid media to reach the same audience.”

The campaign was so successful that Deluxe went on to create a TV show around it called Main Street, where they invest $500,000 and human resources like Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec into an inspiring small town and capture the transformation in action. Season One premiered on Hulu and Season Two is in post-production.