Category: Allgemein

By Isabelle Rogat

Let me take you with me on a small dream-like journey through our Marketing World and how it plays a role in, well, building brighter futures.

A fever dream, but still – a dream.
So close your eyes (metaphorically) and lean back (literally)…

You are a sneaker.
(Yup, never thought you’d read those words in a FRANKly, but here we are.)
You’ve descended from the mind of a London Designer, fueled by oat milk latte, traveled to the hands of a Bangladeshi factory worker, were shipped over 2 oceans, 3 railroads and one rather rough-handling UPS driver to a New York Showroom in Manhattan.

You are more internationally traveled than the buying agent AND sales rep combined.
You cost 295$ and made up of 40$ worth of material.
You – are supposed to become the next big thing.
By the second that you arrive in the 12th floor Manhattan Showroom in your full beauty, you are being swarmed by TikTok-swiping, Adidas Samba-wearing Marketeers with the most creative of ideas to not only bring you into the shelves of this world, but into the hearts & feeds.
“How about a moving Online Video campaign, in which we position you as the footwear of the brave, showing world changers of 2023 proudly strutting in style?”
“What if we created a TikTok Challenge, using you as the modern version of the Cinderella shoe needing to find its owner?”
“Maybe we could create a digital version of you and place you in games like Fortnite?”

Cut. New dream.
Now, you are an NGO fighting gendered crime.
Or a political policy trying to further transatlantic understanding.
Or the 1.5 degree goal.
You’d been standing on the street with a megaphone and a 20 page, well-researched, factually correct – but sadly, quite boring – speech script. As a matter of fact, you could swear you saw the marketeers from your first dream pass by you on their way to buy the fake cinderella crown for their TikTok.
They didn’t notice you though, you were just going off about the statistics of some regulation – and also, you were facing in the wrong direction.
One marketing student helped you design some flyers, but their time & stock image royalty only amounted to a poorly lit image of you holding your speech with a comic sans headline. With a spelling mistake.
One person stood in front of your speech and clapped.
It was your working student.
Somewhere in the back, crickets chirping.

Now you wake up.
What you’ve just endured wasn’t just a very unfortunate use of your dream time (and by that, rather hard to explain to your therapist) – but the central marketing dilemma preventing us from advancing to those futures we’re reading about in this FRANKly. The unequal distribution of true, cutting edge creativity.

Because if we think about what moves our public opinion, our hypes, our trends – it’s never been what is most important. Most highly produced. Or even most aesthetic.
What creates queues in front of “Live Fast Die Young” stores is the same thing missing in furthering gender equality. What currently sells out Taylor Swift Tour shows in our cinemas is the same thing that is missing when we try to get people to fight against climate change.

Creative Ideas.
Innovative narratives separating what the core of the issue is and what it is being wrapped in.
Finding ways to bring this state of the art commercial creativity to our socio-economical, political and ecological challenges will be at the center of how Marketing can truly create a brighter future for us.
That’s what I’ve founded “thjnk Zeitgeist” for, a Trend & Innovation Creative Consultancy within the thjnk group.
That’s why for all Fulbrighters, we can be easily reached via Whatsapp (+49 40 41 34 99 34) and why I will always aim to use creativity for good.
Because who says, it’s always the sneaker being charmed by marketeers.
Why not the sneaker AND the policy?

So: If you are a Fulbrighter or Alumni pushing forward change in your organization, your party or your personal projects and you are looking to elevate your novel goals to public hype: Feel free to call, text, voice memo.
Let’s build a brighter future, 2023-style.

Author Info

Isabelle Rogat is a true marketing chameleon, having recently founded a Trend & Gen Z Hub in her Agency thjnk. At 25, she is not only working on building more “new age competence” in the advertising industry, but also a 40 under 40, columnist, podcast host and youngboard member. Ever since she has participated in a Fulbright Summer School at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, she has been closely associated with the program.

by Jan Moellmann

I believe in the power of technology, entrepreneurship and our agency as humans to build a brighter future. The rise of impact investing and impact entrepreneurship is a great expression of this. More and more people are using their talent, time and resources to work on a sustainable future, acknowledging that there is more at stake than just money. Impact investing and entrepreneurship are both trying to generate intentional and measurable positive social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. However, the difficulty faced by these actors is that there is a lack of data that would help to identify, incentivize and manage impact in a transparent, credible and efficient way.

Most, if not all, things that scaled extraordinarily well over the last decades were based on the availability of data that was then used for data-driven decision-making. Maximizing something requires measuring this something – be it user engagement for Facebook, delivery times for instant delivery services or simply financial returns for an asset manager. Now, what we need to scale fast to avoid collapse and to work towards a future in which the planet and people thrive is positive impact; hence, we need to measure this impact. If we would have the right data available, it would be possible to make better consumer decisions, to manage by impact objectives, to incentivize impact through regulation and even to bake impact into financial products to make sure that impact-generating enterprises have access to the funding they need to realize and scale their projects and products.

Unfortunately, measuring impact is not an easy task. I have been there. Working for a social enterprise on rural electrification in West Africa, I knew how valuable it would be to measure and communicate not only how many of our customers gained access to electricity, but also what this access to electricity means in terms of socio-economic development such as productivity increases, women empowerment, safety as well as access to healthcare and education. At the same time, it was difficult to gather this data. A typical social enterprise does not have scientists who understand how to collect such data accurately and also not software and data teams who could take care of a streamlined data pipeline for ongoing impact monitoring and reporting. Some digital solutions exist that approximate impact based on secondary data, i.e. forecasting impact based on similar projects. But is it really accurate, helpful, transparent or even morally acceptable to judge impact without measuring it where it actually occurs? I find this approach particularly concerning when it comes to assessing social impact: If we want to understand which products and projects actually change the lives of people for the better, we better collect the data at the source by asking the people whose lives we aim to improve.

After witnessing these challenges first-hand and talking to dozens of other social entrepreneurs who faced similar problems, I decided to start a software company in 2022 that supports impact-driven organizations and their capital providers in measuring, verifying and reporting their true impact. At leonardo, we try our best to measure sustainability where sustainability effects actually occur and then to use this data to empower impact-driven management and investment decisions. You can find more information about leonardo at https://www.leonardo-impact.com/ 

Technology plays a key role here: Large language models can be used for verifying, understanding and utilizing large amounts of interview data; the blockchain can be used for storing and transmitting impact data in a transparent and traceable way as well as tokenizing impact to make it invest- and tradeable. At the end of the day, though, it is not about the technology or data itself, but about using it for the right purposes. We need to stop wasting our talent, time and resources working on things that will only benefit one’s own bank account. We need to use technology and business to work on the things that matter. A brighter future is possible if we start building it together.

Author Info

Jan Moellmann is co-founder & CEO @ leonardo. impact and a doctoral candidate @ TU Munich. leonardo aims to make deep impact measurement, verification and reporting easy and credible. After 4 years as Finance Director of the social startup Africa GreenTec and while conducting research about the topic as a doctoral candidate at TUM, he discovered the great value that trustworthy impact data has for sustainability-focused enterprises, but also how hard it is to get this data – leading him to co-found leonardo. Jan holds Master’s degrees in Engineering Management from TU Braunschweig and Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech where he spent one year in Atlanta on a Fulbright scholarship. He and his wife Lena live in Frankfurt, Germany, and love to hike and bike through mountains whenever they get the chance.

by Geghie Davis-Tillie

copy-edited by Itto Outini

What enters the average person’s mind in response to the phrase “diversity and inclusion”? For some, these words may conjure up images of corporate boardrooms ticking off checkboxes. For others, they may call to mind well-intentioned policymakers striving to create more welcoming professional atmospheres. In reality, however, these words ought to evoke more than corporate policies. They are ideals whose realization demands consideration of the vast and vivid tapestry of human experiences, abilities, and perspectives that occur throughout the world.

Consideration of this tapestry – and with it, the commitment to diversity and inclusion that it inspires – animates Fulbrighters with Disabilities (FWD), a global, virtual chapter of the Fulbright Association.

FWD is the first chapter of the Fulbright Association to focus on supporting students and scholars with disabilities. To this end, we’ve embraced a virtual model to increase our global reach and foster national, cultural, geographical, linguistic, and ethnic diversity without requiring that people with limited mobility travel long distances, live away from their families, or forsake their local support systems. This, we believe, is an essential strategy for building a more diverse and inclusive future. Since our launch in 2021, we’ve made significant progress toward building a diverse, international community, advancing advocacy efforts, and collaborating with other chapters and partner organizations.

Our board consists of four members: President Geghie Davis-Tillie, Vice President Keegan Julius, Treasurer Istou Diallo, and Secretary Frank Mondelli. We all identify as people with disabilities. Our efforts are supported by the contributions of many wonderful volunteers. As a Neurodivergent woman with multiple invisible, physical disabilities, I consider it a privilege and honor to lead such an extraordinary team toward fulfilling our potential to contribute to the Fulbright community and better the world.

Our chapter’s founder, Itto Outini, worked long and hard to get FWD off the ground. A totally blind Fulbright alumna, journalist, writer, Steinbeck Fellow, and international public speaker, Itto has since gone on to launch her own international media platform, The DateKeepers, in partnership with her husband. Both projects reflect Itto’s commitment to elevating diversity and inclusion beyond the banal verbiage of the boardroom and bringing together individuals with diverse perspectives and abilities, from all walks of life and every corner of the globe, to strive together toward a common cause. Without Itto’s unwavering vigilance and dedication, neither our chapter nor The DateKeepers would be here today.

In 2022, a year after founding the chapter, Itto passed on the presidency of FWD to me. At the time, I’d just returned from my Fulbright in England and had connected with Itto via LinkedIn, where she was seeking scholars with disabilities to interview and profile. This encouraged me to share with her my stories from my time in England, including how the Fulbright Association and my university had helped me acquire official ADHD and dyslexia diagnoses and access therapy, which I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford. Spurred by the revelation that I’m Neurodivergent, and that there’s a vast community of Neurodivergent individuals all over the world, I ended up writing my thesis on sensory processing differences (SPD) and how implementing more accessible and inclusive design practices can help those of us with such conditions more easily navigate public spaces. Back in the U.S., I wanted to do more, deepening my engagement with the international Neurodivergent community while also giving back to the Fulbright Association. Sensing my passion, Itto encouraged me to take a leading role in FWD. 

This year, we attended Fulbright Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., where we engaged with policymakers to secure Fulbright funding. In July, I had the honor of flying to London to attend the first Fulbrighter and Community Engagement Workshop, where over 30 Fulbright alumni and friends from all around the world gathered to brainstorm strategies for improving social connectivity. Possibly our proudest achievement has been our successful implementation of the first-ever sensory room at the Fulbright Association Conference in Denver – though speaking at the Youth Summit and participating in the table-top event are close runners-up.

Fulbrighters with Disabilities is more than a chapter. We are a movement united by the common vision of seeing diversity celebrated and inclusivity becoming the norm. Our commitment to pushing boundaries through advocacy, education, and innovation knows no bounds. As we advance toward the horizon, I hope FWD can serve our community as a guiding light illuminating paths toward a world where every thread of our diverse tapestry is recognized and celebrated and where no one is left behind.

For more information about Fulbrighters with Disabilities or the DateKeepers, please reach out by emailing the chapter at fwd@fulbright.org 

Author Info

Geghie Davis-Tillie is a human-centered designer with a focus in UX/UI East Tennessee in the U.S. She currently serves as President of the Fulbrighters with Disabilities chapter within the Fulbright Association. With a deep connection to her Appalachian heritage and her personal experience as someone with multiple invisible disabilities including Neurodivergence, Geghie brings a distinctive and multifaceted perspective to her storytelling, making it truly unique.

For more FRANKly articles from our 2023 magazine, look here!

Are you ready to read the 34th edition of the FRANKly magazine?

The FRANKly is our yearly association publication, where our members and other Fulbrighters write articles on a particular theme.

This year’s theme is “Building a Brighter Future”, and includes articles on embracing diversity, deeper conversations, the German-American Revolution, Hype Culture, as well as a lot of activities from our members and board over the past year.

Take a peek inside. We’ll be sharing the articles individually here on our website, so that they are easier to read and share.

The 34th Edition of the FRANKly magazine: FRANKly34_2023

The 2020 Call for Articles for our association’s annual journal FRANKly is now available. Our editor this year – Jana Frey – is looking forward to your contributions on this year’s topic “reinventing comunities”.

Articles that exhibit a connection with the Fulbright Program, the German Fulbright Alumni Association (F.A.e.V.), or the network of Fulbright Alumni Associations across the globe are always encouraged. When submitting your article, please provide 2-3 sentences about yourself and a headshot. Authors are encouraged to submit images (3-6 images total) that support their article. Every photograph must include the photographer’s name and a caption. Articles may range in length from 3,000-12,000 characters (including spaces) and should be written in American English. The deadline for submissions is June 7, 2020.

Reinventing Communities

Being part of a community – or of different communities – is one of the most important aspects of our lives, as they are places where we connect with other people. The way we feel about communities and the way we act within in them shapes us as people and contributes to who we are.

As Fulbrighters we have all jumped at the opportunity to leave our own home communities for a time, at the opportunity to be part of new host communities in a different country as well as to completely create our own communities that are neither home nor host community, but something new. Communities today are capable of bridging borders. As members of the Fulbright Alumni e.V. we are part of a huge community of different people from all over. And we might be part of other communities: the sports community, the music community, the physical community of our home town or broadly speaking – the online community.

But the way we understand community has been changing drastically. The FRANKly 2020 welcomes contributions that focus on what community means to you: What experiences have you had with moving between different communities and which communities have you been part of? How have they shaped you and how have you shaped them? How have communities changed? And what kinds of opportunities might lie ahead in the communities of the future? How have we reinvented what community means to us in the
past? And will outside influences change our community beyond recognition, or can we take an active part in reinventing what community is today in a positive way?

Download Call for Articles 2020