The Genesis Tree

Interactive educational content marketing

  • Led the design, development, and implementation of an interactive educational resource
  • Worked across department lines, managed contractors, and oversaw budget from inception to completion
  • Supervised and edited content to ensure technical details were intuitive
  • Resulted in increased memorability and improved subscriber retension

If you struggle with the legal complexities of insurance and only understand your personal coverage on a casual level, congratulations, you’re officially a normal person! What if, however, you’re on the business side of insurance and need to explain why your insureds should stick with you?

So much of insurance marketing focuses on two things: (1) the peace of mind that comes with a ‘good’ insurance policy, and (2) the price of that insurance. Check out any insurance ad on YouTube (and there are lots of good ones), and nearly all of them boil down to one or both of those core messages.

Insurance is such a technical field, filled with literal volumes of industry-specific jargon designed specifically to hold up to legal scrutiny, that insurance companies have little incentive to go outside of these tried and true messages.

In working with the Genesis Reciprocal Insurance Exchange, however, we needed more than just reliance on peace of mind and good pricing. Our subscribers needed to actually understand what the reciprocal does and why it’s important to them. Pricing and peace of mind just didn’t seem to cut it.

Exacerbating the problem was that, if normal people only sort of understand how insurance works, they definitely don’t know what a reciprocal is or how it’s different from a regular insurance company. (Heck, even some people that had been working at the organization for years hadn’t the slightest clue!)

With these issues combined, we decided to create an interactive resource designed to help insureds understand Genesis on a fundamental level and how it works for their benefit.

The project started with a desire to lean into the leaf motif in the Genesis logo, relating the reciprocal to a tree. The tree grows to support the birds (the insureds, in this analogy) with safety, stability, and resources. Using the tree, the birds help each other out and share what they have, allowing the ecosystem within the tree to continue to flourish.

"I feel like I finally understand insurance," one of my colleagues told me later. Perhaps my only lingering regret is that I don't have an interactive like it to walk me through all the ups and downs of my own coverage.