Stories of Care & Change
Berry Street
How do you tell one organisation’s story at two very different scales?
Sometimes the story is one person.
Sometimes it's an organisation that's been changing lives for more than 140 years.
Across a long relationship with Berry Street, Clipo has helped communicate both.
Same organisation. Different storytelling tools.
For the Foster Care Recruitment Campaign, we focused closely on the experiences of carers themselves — creating warm, personal films designed to help people in regional Victoria imagine opening their home to a local child.
For Telling Our Story, we zoomed out.
The challenge was to bring Berry Street's history, purpose and broad range of services together into one clear organisational story — spanning trauma recovery, family violence, safe homes, education and early support for families and communities.
At a glance
Long-term Berry Street collaboration
Foster Care recruitment campaign inc TVC
Hero film + individual social stories
Regional Victoria focus
Direct-to-camera interviews
5+ minute organisational strategy film
Interviews + observational footage + motion graphics
Campaign / Social / Internal + Stakeholder Communications
Foster Care Recruitment
Don't tell people what foster care means. Let carers show them.
Recruiting foster carers is a difficult communications challenge.
People may understand that carers are needed without being able to imagine themselves actually doing it.
Berry Street wanted to reach potential carers — particularly in regional Victoria — with stories that felt honest, relatable and human rather than like conventional recruitment advertising.
Our approach was to put the people already doing it at the centre.
The main film brings together carers with very different experiences, filmed simply and warmly in home environments. They speak directly to the audience while everyday details of caring unfold around them.
Straight down the lens
We used direct-to-camera interviews to reduce the distance between the person speaking and the person watching.
The technique only works if contributors feel comfortable enough to stop thinking about the camera.
So much of the work happens before and around the interview itself — building rapport, listening properly and creating an environment where people can speak naturally rather than perform.
That thinking was built into our original approach, which prioritised authentic, empathetic interviews and a filming process that would make contributors feel safe enough to speak openly.
The finished films are deliberately restrained.
Warm homes, natural light, small domestic moments.
The longer recruitment film introduces multiple carers and creates a broader picture of foster care.
Shorter films then allow individual experiences to stand on their own.
Alice's Story, for example, becomes a focused 30-second piece: one person, one experience and one clear invitation to become a foster carer for a local child.
That gave Berry Street a family of content rather than a single campaign film — longer storytelling when audiences had time to engage and shorter pieces for social channels.
“We wanted someone who would truly connect with the people they were filming and make them feel comfortable so that they could share their personal story in a way that was open, honest and heartfelt. The results were even better than we expected.”
Berry Street, Marketing Manager, Luke Meney
Telling Our Story
How do you fit 140+ years — and a very complex organisation — into one coherent story?
Berry Street works across trauma, family violence, out-of-home care, education and family support.
The challenge wasn't a lack of things to say.
It was deciding how everything connected.
Berry Street wanted the film to help staff understand and articulate the organisation's evolving strategy, while also giving external audiences a clearer understanding of its work.
We structured the story around a simple progression:
Where Berry Street came from.
The challenges facing children and families now.
How Berry Street responds.
The future it is working towards.
The strategy itself identified five interconnected areas: healing trauma, addressing family violence, providing safe homes, trauma-informed education and proactive support for families and communities.
Staff interviews provide the human voice, while footage, photography, historical material and custom motion graphics help us move between Berry Street's history, different service areas and future direction.
The graphic system became particularly important.
Rather than simply placing titles over interviews, we used Berry Street's colours, shapes and illustrated elements to create transitions, identify different areas of work and turn more complex information into something audiences could follow visually.
The original creative development specifically called for a cohesive relationship between message, imagery and graphics, with the resulting visual language capable of extending into Berry Street's wider communications.