Colmena Lab describes itself as a "social impact company" rather than a communications agency: we spoke with its leaders to learn more about the project.
*Article taken from El Financiero, written by Andrea Mora Zamora.
Costa Rican communicator Fabio Víquez defines 'Colmena Lab'—the company he leads with Ecuadorian Violeta Sánchez—as a "social impact company" rather than a communications agency.
Their work, while it is what is traditionally associated with these agencies—with strategic communication, public relations, audiovisual production, digital and social media marketing—differs from the traditional approach, as they focus on "generating positive social and environmental impacts" working only with projects related to climate change, human rights and indigenous peoples, among others.
Colmena was born in 2018 and with this approach has already worked with clients of the stature of Amnesty International and the German Agency for Development Cooperation (GIZ), with projects that extend throughout Latin America and even Europe.
We spoke with Víquez and Sánchez to learn more about how they have made this model sustainable.
Idealists and Entrepreneurs
Víquez and Sánchez have been working for more than a decade on social projects and causes with NGOs, governments and companies.
This is how they met, in 2015, working together towards COP21 and the signing of the Paris Agreements, and this is how 'Colmena Lab' emerged after they "realized that there was this need in Latin American organizations to have access to sophisticated communication tools".
According to Sánchez in an interview with 'EF', "we started to put together this 'startup' with the aim of focusing on bringing the best communication practices to civil society organizations, indigenous people, local communities and social movements, as these organizations tend to have somewhat restricted opportunities to use these tools that help them a lot with their media and political influence. That's where 'Colmena Lab' came from: a company that provides these services affordably and without losing specificity and DNA."
"Ours is an innovative, different business model: it is not like the traditional one that an NGO does, nor the creative one that an agency does. What we are looking for is to unite the two worlds to try to, on the one hand, maintain the idealism that an NGO has, but at the same time maintain the capabilities that a startup has and give organization and results to projects," added Víquez.
Colmena Lab works 100% remotely and with an international team that operates with a portfolio of projects that, although mainly Latin American, have reached organizations such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), based in Switzerland.
According to the Costa Rican, these clients are obtained as "bare-knuckle entrepreneurs: looking for international tenders, no matter the country, as long as it fits our approach. We go to open competitions and make ourselves known through allies and networking and that is how we have achieved good international projects."
For Víquez, although his company is full of "idealists", the key in this business has been "to think like entrepreneurs" to carry forward not only the agency, but also the objectives of the organizations they work with:
"We invest in training and in a lot of technological tools and we have also been sharpening our fangs to see what each organization requires and thus achieve that the project is successful. Of course we work with a lot of traditional indicators but since we are not a service provider that arrives, sells you and leaves, our strategy has focused on creating alliances with partners, on positioning political and advocacy objectives and that is why each project has its own parameters," he said.
For example, one of the lines of action is to educate organizations in communication strategies and content generation tools so that projects continue to move forward beyond contracts.
According to Sánchez, this is useful because "we know that not all NGOs have a designer or a specific person for video and that is why we give them tools that they can use over time, without the need to have a specific professional for that."
That is what they did with Amnesty International Americas, within the framework of a project on the lawsuit that nine young activists filed in Ecuador against the oil flares in that country that operated in the neighborhoods of the plaintiffs.
Justice ruled in favor of the minors in 2021 and "now the challenge is for the State to comply with the legal ruling that orders the elimination of the flares that are around their homes," Sánchez said:
"For this, the organization's requirement was that the activists could create their own content, that they could become spokespersons and that they learned to handle design tools, so now we have girls whose ages range from 11 to 18 years old, producing content with ease, without losing professionalism and its political impact."
Those who wish to know more about this company can enter their website and social networks.
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