Experiential agency Hydraulic Marketing Group is launching a new division intended to focus specifically on purpose-driven work and clients.
For experiential-focused shops like Hydraulic, the pandemic was particularly difficult. Events were cancelled, venues were locked down and quarantine measures made experiential next to impossible to deliver. “Things just went dormant and a lot of our clients went dark,” explains John Lacey, the agency’s founder and partner.
But when the quarantine and lockdown measures were lifted and the agency returned to work, it identified a new demand among existing clients – one that was increasingly becoming a priority for new prospective clients, as well.
“There seemed to be greater interest in connecting with customers on a deeper, more emotional level,” Lacey explains.
Hydraulic began looking at ways to better connect their clients with those customers, but it wasn’t until it began working with Toronto-based non-profit MaRS Discovery District, which oversees an educational career summit for disadvantaged youth, that the agency put two and two together.
“They started to tell us how important live events were for them to create that deeper connection. While online has its place in what they do, they needed to be live,” Lacey explains. “And as our other clients started to ask for it, we looked around and realized there isn’t really anyone in the experiential space who is working in this [purpose-driven] area, specifically. We wanted to build that centre of expertise.”
And so Shift_Better was born, with the mission of delivering experiential work specifically for social impact organizations, non-profits and companies looking to deliver purpose-driven experiences.
However, it wasn’t enough for Hydraulic to simply slap a new name on the work they were already doing. While the agency has more than 15 years experience with purpose-driven projects, “we needed a new model for thinking about them, and new tools to measure their success,” says Lacey.
“Even though the experiential component for purpose-driven organizations is quite similar, a big part of it is understanding the impact you’re having,” he adds. “We’ve always been an agency that has had tools for measuring how well we’re doing against our objectives – but this isn’t just KPIs of X number of interactions, Y number of engagements or Z drives for a car program. We knew we needed a way to measure our [social] impact.”
With that in mind, one of the division’s core tenets was set. Shift_Better created what Lacey calls “Every Day Impact” – the notion that change for the better is best achieved through small changes made by many people on an everyday basis.
“We purposefully did not call ourselves a ‘social impact’ agency, because that kind of marginalizes us,” he explains, pointing to social impact initiatives such as Canadian businesses moving from plastic bags to reusables. Once those initiatives achieve widespread adoption and become second nature to the masses, they’re no longer “social impact” efforts, but rather represent the “everyday” impact that Shift_Better aims to create.
In the short term, Hydraulic will staff Shift_Better with its own existing employees, but the company will be making a number of net new hires to support the division as it wins more clients, including an unnamed social enterprise brand that it has just partnered with. It is launching with MaRS Discovery District, the Sunnybrook Foundation, and GreenShield – all existing Hydraulic clients – on its roster.
The end goal is for Shift_Better to eventually become a standalone practice, says Lacey.
