When Twitter wanted to model for the world healthy conversations, they hired us to host 20,000 conversations across 40 cities over 10 days. This was Twitter’s largest consumer-facing experiential marketing campaign to date. Their Head of Global Brand Strategy Tweeted, “This is really the most meaningful work I’ve seen at Twitter ever. So inspiring and so moving.” Twitter reported that this activation had the highest “joy” sentiment index on Twitter of any activation they’d ever done.
Working with the Museum for the United Nations and with support from the Ikea Conversation, we launched the world's largest dialogue on climate through Portals across the world. These Portals connected to one another and to major world leaders at Climate Week, the UN General Assembly and COP27.
A Container Portal was placed outside the Vancouver Convention Centre for TED's flagship 2017 conference, connecting attendees with global conversations. TED engaged Portals to facilitate its mission to spread new and exciting ideas by bringing new voices into the conversation and expanding TED’s discussions around the globe.
Andover Public Schools brings the Inflatable\_portal to different schools within the district, allowing for students of all ages to connect to portal sites around the world. Students develop familiarity and understanding of communities from Erbil, Iraq to Kigali, Rwanda, and engage directly with people they would never otherwise encounter. Teachers use the portal to enhance and globalize education with a curriculum that explores:
Google used Portals at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit to connect participants to innovators at their Google for Entrepreneurs hubs in London, Seoul and Mexico City. Start-up founders who could not attend were able to pitch to Silicon Valley VCs and connect with mentors without ever having to leave their cities.
LEGO used Portals to introduce employees to novel approaches to solving everyday business challenges. Through a series of meals, Shared\_Studios connected LEGO leadership with startups in Stockholm and Mexico City to learn about what the future of “play” looks like in different contexts and cultures.
Shared\_Studios collaborated with Johns Hopkins University to bring together students in Baltimore, Beirut, and Gaza through virtual-exchange “hackathons.” Students form teams through the portal and work as one unit to solve a problem related to public health. The hackathon teaches participants transferable design skills as they tackle challenges facing refugee communities in Beirut and Gaza, emphasizing cultural literacy, teamwork, and design thinking.
Shared\_Studios placed a Portal at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for connections between museum-goers and displaced communities in Erbil, Iraq; Amman, Jordan; and Berlin, Germany. The exhibit connected the atrocities of the past and the refugee crises of the present, while humanizing complex geopolitical events that many attendees knew little about. These conversations created an opportunity for those impacted to share stories and dispel stereotypes, and a venue for dialogue between two groups who would otherwise never meet. As the Washington Post reported: “Roughly 1,600 visitors have used the portal since it arrived in December..., and many of those tourists and schoolchildren have filled the exhibit’s guest book with heartfelt reflections. It shows ‘what we wanted to achieve,’ said [Cameron Hudson, director of the museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide], ‘which is the humanization of these conflicts, and for people to walk away with the idea that these aren’t just numbers, that these are individuals, and each individual has a story of survival.’”
Shared\_Studios worked with Coca-Cola and its juice brand, Del Valle, to connect consumers in Mexico City directly with citrus grove farmers in Veracruz. Inside the portal, consumers learned about growing and harvesting the oranges, and heard first-hand from farmers about the effort and care that goes into every step of the process.