The Federal Bar Association (FBA) is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year — powered by a book, video, website, and more produced by MCI USA. The FBA’s goal was to use its centennial to celebrate its past while driving membership and giving to help secure its present and future. Here’s how the MCI USA Creative team helped them do that:

  1. We wrote a book. We began by researching, writing, designing, and overseeing publication of Federal Bar Association Centennial: Celebrating 100 Years of the Bar and the Bench, 1920–2020, a handsome, 62-page hardcover book based on exhaustive research through the FBA’s extensive archive of publications, documents, and photos as well as third-party sources such as online government records and newspaper libraries. Throughout this work, we regularly uncovered things from the FBA’s history that surprised and delighted our client, such as that the organization’s founding president was born before the Civil War, its first Black member was the son of a former enslaved person, another president helped prosecute the Nuremberg war-crimes trials after World War II, and more.
  2. We went viral. We also worked with the FBA to build, launch, and administer fedbar100.org, a website that served as a living, growing hub for the entire Centennial project. Organized around the theme “100 Stories,” we mixed historical material from the book with testimonials and recollections from past and current leaders, information about a planned centennial gala, and membership and fundraising appeals. We aligned that with an email and social media campaign designed to collect stories from members, drive interest in the gala, and solicit contributions for the Foundation of the FBA.
  3. We shot a movie. In planning the centennial gala, the FBA decided they needed a keynote presentation — and that in lieu of a speaker they would show a video about their first 100 years. They asked MCI USA to create it. Reshaping some of the material we’d developed for the book, our Creative team wrote, designed, and produced a 17-minute movie, including selecting a professional voice actor to serve as narrator and a musical score for the soundtrack.
  4. We showed up. When the pandemic forced the FBA to scrap plans for the gala, they decided to celebrate the centennial by hosting a world-premiere screening of the video during their annual conference, which was moved online. The screening was followed by a conversation between FBA Executive Director Stacy King and MCI USA’s AVP of Content, Chris Durso, who shared details about our work on the book.

This was an ambitious project for MCI USA Creative, we and nailed every part of it. The FBA was very pleased with our work — so much so that Stacy co-presented a session about it with Chris at the Association Media & Publishing 2020 Virtual Annual Conference in October.

 

 

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