Kristin Gutekunst on VR for good
It didn’t take me long when I started doing research about fundraising via virtual reality to bump into UNVR, the (now defunct) groundbreaking advocacy-through-VR program at the United Nations. I was impressed by the quality of their content and by how early they were using VR for good. I met with Kristin Gutekunst, Co-Founder & CEO of Overview Collective, and a member of the original team at UNVR.
Can you tell me more about UNVR and what you did there?
Gabo Arora & Chris Milk created Clouds over Sidra in January 2015 (way ahead of when there were actually consumer headsets) with the added value of us being in the United Nations and having access to some of the world’s decision makers as well as a huge network of partners who were also looking to communicate the same issues.
A lot of the content that we made was really brand agnostic in terms of the different UN agencies. We tried to have a broad approach so that it could be really tailored for different advocacy messages. My role as executive producer was essentially building those partnerships and designing the launch and the brand building of UNVR and the different films, as well as running a lot of the exhibits.
Then I really started experimenting with students on how to build curriculum around this and use VR as a guided discussion tool. How can we send people on trips to places they might not even be interested in seeing and get them to understand the humanity in the numbers? We benefited from this niche of being in-between diplomacy, entertainment, and the new emerging tech to hit many different media markets. We were really successful in the beginning with having a lot of attention drawn to it.
How did you work with Gabo on these projects?
As Gabo was really interested and in charge of creating content, I was really interested in fostering the ecosystem around it, which meant creating some of the high level partnerships with headset companies—who helped us with donations, or actually just sending brand ambassadors to host exhibits around the world—or with companies and creators who wanted to help us curate and exhibit content.
We started to get into the space of doing exhibits all over the place: pop ups or one week long exhibits and then helping our different U.N. teammates with how they build their strategies around it. One of the difficulties I think a lot of the U.N. agencies faced was that they often didn’t have the full perspective of how to use the tech effectively considering the cost. A lot of times it was created for a one off event or for one particular moment without a broader campaign focus or the tie-in to fundraising or the different asks to be able to track how effective it was.
Some of the strategic planning approaches and the different ways that we tried to use VR for impact have become systematic in terms of how I continue to work with different entities, especially in VR for Good—ensuring that these boxes are ticked.
What happened to the program?
The Campaign was going through a difficult time because it moved from the Millennium Development era to the Sustainable Development era which meant that the mandate and the fundraising ended and all had to restart.
It was hard to continue going out the partners and creating all these new initiatives and promises without having the security of a longer term plan in mind. Some of that was management issues at the U.N. There was a huge restructure that was happening at the same time and they were changing a lot of how the campaign was structured. The VR program got caught in the middle and wasn’t able to be sustained anymore.
I moved over to the World Food Program and I helped them launch the first augmented reality and then designed a rollout strategy to incorporate experiential marketing