Hereford-based firm is applying four decades of systems-design experience to a problem many organisations face: good individual pieces of communication that fail to work together.
Moonrise Media, a Hereford-based media and communications company, has been certified as a B Corporation, meeting independently verified standards for governance, transparency, and social and environmental performance.
Founder Will Hopkins spent four decades in software architecture before moving into filmmaking. He says that background increasingly shapes the way Moonrise approaches communication itself.
“In software, you can have excellent individual components and still end up with a system that doesn’t work,” said Hopkins. “I began to realise organisations can have exactly the same problem with communication. They can produce a good film, a good website or a good campaign, but the individual pieces don’t necessarily work together to move people towards anything.”
That observation led Hopkins to develop what Moonrise Media calls Narrative Architecture: a systems-led approach to understanding the stories an organisation already has, identifying where communication is failing to connect, and designing how those stories can work together over time.
“For years I thought I was in the film business,” Hopkins said. “What I eventually realised was that the film is only one part of a much bigger communication system. Once you see that, the question changes from ‘What content should we make?’ to ‘What are we actually trying to help people understand, feel and do?’
“The creative industry has a structural flaw: we are often asked to build the roof before the foundation has been poured. By the time a brief for a video arrives, many of the strategic decisions that determine whether it can create change have already been made. Narrative Architecture brings engineering rigour to that foundation, giving the resulting work the structural integrity to carry the weight of the organisation’s mission.”
Moonrise has recently applied that thinking in its work with Hereford Food Bank, where a film was created to help local businesses understand the organisation’s continuing role in the community and encourage longer-term partnership rather than simply one-off donations.
The B Corp certification, verified by non-profit B Lab, places Moonrise Media within a growing international movement of independently verified businesses committed to balancing commercial success with social and environmental responsibility.
For Hopkins, the certification also provides external scrutiny of the values and standards behind the company’s own work.
“I suppose I’ve ended up bringing the same instincts into the business itself. Governance, suppliers, environmental impact, the way we treat people – they’re all parts of the same system. B Corp gave us an independent way of testing whether that system actually reflects the values we say we have.”
Chris Turner, CEO of B Lab UK, says: “Welcoming Moonrise Media to the B Corp community is hugely exciting. Its commitment to doing business differently, bringing architectural rigour to the world of storytelling, will be an inspiration to others and will help spread the notion that success in business is as much about people and planet as it is profit.”
Moonrise Media is a member of the Herefordshire & Worcestershire Chamber of Commerce, and joins a growing list of UK B Corps that includes household names such as The Guardian and Tony’s Chocolonely.
For more information: www.moonrise.media