Insights

As the edtech industry continues to evolve, our job as leaders is to discover how our organizations can adapt to new challenges. I recently got to connect with leaders at Tyton Partners and Swissa Creative during this year’s ASU+GSV Summit and had two insightful conversations about how Cambium has done just that.

During the first panel with Adam Newman, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Tyton Partners, we discussed how over the past two years Cambium focused on reconnecting with our purpose, which is to ensure students and teachers feel seen, valued and supported. I continued the conversation with Kobi Swissa from Swissa Creative about how video storytelling allows us to share that purpose with both internal and external audiences in a very powerful way.

Leading Through Uncertainty

At the beginning of the pandemic, we had to look internally and externally to ensure all the customers and teachers that we serve were feeling seen, valued and supported. This purpose became the driving factor behind everything we do.

Internally, we discovered that the flexibility of remote work allowed our employees to focus on innovating rather than the stresses that could be associated with being in an office during a pandemic. The best work is done when confounding variables are taken out of the equation. For Cambium, that meant maintaining flexible schedules and continuing to listen to employee concerns as we adapted to a Remote First model.

Externally, we needed to make sure the edtech products we were delivering met the needs of students, teachers, parents and administrators. More specifically, we needed to ensure that educators were receiving the support they needed as more and more was being asked of them.

To continue the momentum of the past couple of years, it’s essential for us to keep our purpose at the core of every decision we make. Any form of growth should be an extension of the work we are doing now. If we were to move away from that, it could result in us losing some of the key factors that got us to where we are. To other businesses, I would say, despite there not being a roadmap for every move you make, use your purpose as a guide to ensure the next phase of business will only further amplify the work you are looking to accomplish.

For more insights on how businesses can continue to meet the demands of today, check out my conversation with Adam here.

The Power of Video Storytelling

When we established our purpose at Cambium, we then had to discover a way to convey it beyond our products, services and company culture. We wanted to find the right team to share our story in the right way.

For the past year and a half, we’ve been working with Kobi Swissa at Swissa Creative to help us start conversations about greater industry trends and how Cambium is working to address them. Video campaigns such as “Honest Conversations,” “All for Literacy, ” and “Back to the Future” use video storytelling to create an emotional connection between us and our customers, while still providing them with avenues to receive the information they need. Beyond typical marketing strategies, video storytelling strikes the right balance between emotion and impactful communication.

Video storytelling has allowed us to share who we are in a rapidly growing space, while also highlighting conversations that we all need to have. I would encourage other organizations to adopt similar strategies as promoting these conversations is not just important for your own company but for the edtech industry as a whole.

For more insights on video storytelling, you can listen to my conversation with Kobi here from the 2022 ASU+GSV Summit.