MEDA Storytelling Initiative

Montana's economic development programs operate on state funding that expires in 2027. Renewing it requires a vote, but letting it end requires nothing. The decision to renew falls to people who reasonably want to see what the money bought. But that’s just the problem. Unless you know where to look, the work of these EDOs is the “invisible” work that disappears behind other people's success stories.

MEDA, the Montana Economic Developers Association, in partnership with the Montana Department of Commerce, hired us to put that work in the spotlight before the next legislative session.

To make this work visible, the goal was to create eight specific stories from across the state, told by the people directly impacted by these programs. Each piece had to show a real outcome and how that outcome depended on a program facing sunset.

We produced eight videos across western, central, and eastern Montana.

The campaign had to speak to two audiences at once. The general public needs a story worth watching, with no assumed knowledge of how any of this works. State legislators need the policy connection made explicit, with a real outcome traced back to the program under review. We had to ride the line between two audience requirements: a story with too few technical details or a list of technical details with too little story.

The second challenge was scale. Eight stories meant more than twenty interviews with business owners, community leaders, and EDO directors across eight communities (spaced across the whole state), all inside a fixed time-window. A single missed interview meant a story without one of its halves, and there was no coming back for it.

We start by breaking a story into its parts. Here, each story had two primary contributing parts: the local businesses receiving assistance and the economic development organizations offering it. Each story shared a common structure: a local business has a goal, encounters an obstacle, meets a partner to remove the obstacle, and then finds success.

Of course, the goals varied. A building revitalization, a business expansion, a new mercantile opening. What they had in common was the shared solution to their obstacle. Where a business couldn’t secure a bank loan, a CRDC stepped in with gap financing. Where an entrepreneur was lost in the process, a CRDC offered technical assistance. In each story, an EDO helped someone get unstuck.

That gave each story two voices. The business owner carried the feeling and showed the outcome. The EDO explained what actually happened and why it mattered. Together, they make the case for the campaign’s core message: these programs are important for Montana, no one else is positioned to do this work, and they should be renewed.

But how do you actually tell the story? Practically speaking, the fate of a campaign like this is decided long before the van leaves the driveway.

A story’s strength is found in post-production, but its potential gets set during pre-production. By the time we’re editing the videos, the range of possible ways to tell a story is already fixed. The strongest one only becomes evident once we’re looking at what we actually have. Which means preparation sets the ceiling on what the edit can do.

We prepared heavily by learning how the CRDC, FADC, and SBDC programs work. We spoke with each EDO and business ahead of time about their circumstances and filming constraints. That research produced questions and enough understanding of the domain to get at the heart of the matter. During the interviews, the pre-written questions became the outpost from which we could chase down rabbit holes, follow-up on off-handed comments, or adapt to the variety of ways in which reality didn’t align with the expectations that our research turned up.

Across eight stories and more than twenty interviews, each one came back with more than one way to tell it.