The overall project—a 2-to-3-year awareness campaign—is ongoing, but it began with a visual refresh. This included a new logo, a new VID, and website updates. From there, we started on the first major campaign.

We took a simple, direct approach, focusing on one of the main benefits of giving through Saskatoon Community Foundation: your story lives on in Saskatoon for years to come.

Leaning into the story aspect, we created beautiful scenes of giving in the form of a large, pop-up storybook. With help from a paper artist, we built out our world—quite literally. Against the Saskatoon skyline, including the historic Bessborough hotel and one of our beloved bridges, we symbolized some of the numerous local initiatives Saskatoon Community Foundation supports, depicting a music room, hospital room, and community garden. Hands dropped in throughout the video to deliver items to each scene— expressing the act of charitable giving— while a voice-over explained what Saskatoon Community Foundation does for our city and their donors.

The video was shot in-house by our main man, Carl Sheldon. We also utilized the ornate, lifelike paper pieces in photoshoots for static outputs—and kept them on permanent display in our office for the creative team to stare at wistfully.

These storybook visuals have since translated to other projects, including DMs and interviews with donors, when we built a “pop-up” tree to scale to immerse our subjects in the storybook world.