What does an effective internal communications video look like when you start by listening to employees? Made for the Audience is a BTS case study series that answers exactly that question — documenting what happens when audience understanding shapes creative work from the very beginning. This post features:

• Client: IAT Insurance Group
• Vertical: Property and Casualty Insurance 
• Type: Internal Communications Video

The Audience

IAT Insurance Group runs one of the more generous employee giving programs in the industry — a multi-tiered charitable match, paid volunteer time off, and a culture that treats community impact as part of the job description. When they came to Myriad to reinforce that giving back is a core part of IAT's values and culture, the brief named one primary audience: internal employees. That's a category, not a person. It tells you who will watch but nothing about what they carry into the room when they do.

The employees were people with specific, personal reasons for giving — reasons that had nothing to do with a company benefit and everything to do with family, loved ones, and community.

A video made for the first description would have reinforced the program. A video made for the real people would have to honor what was already inside them.

Before We Shot a Frame

IAT came to Myriad with a creative brief that was honest about its challenge: awareness of the giving program was high, but participation wasn't where it could be. The instinct was to make something inspiring — uplifting, authentic, purpose-driven. The problem was that instinct alone wasn't enough to tell us what "authentic" actually looked like for IAT employees specifically.

So before a single creative concept was developed, Myriad and IAT worked together to design and deploy an employee survey. Not a satisfaction survey. An audience survey — one built to surface emotional drivers, personal stories, and the lived experience of giving at IAT rather than just measuring awareness or participation rates.

The responses were detailed, specific, and in several cases, genuinely moving.

What They Needed

Most corporate giving videos land in a similar place. The organization has something true and important to say — we match donations, we give paid time off, we care about community. And so they say it, clearly and earnestly, to people who already know.

But an employee who already gives doesn't need to be told the program exists. What they need is to feel seen — to watch something and recognize themselves and their reasons in it. And an employee who hasn't yet participated isn't waiting for more information. They're waiting for someone who sounds like them to make the case in language that feels real.

The survey made both of those needs visible before anyone touched a script.

What did employees actually tell us?

Four things emerged clearly from what IAT employees shared:

1. People give for deeply personal reasons — family illness, addiction recovery, faith, a friend's loss. The causes were specific and the connections were intimate.
2. The most powerful moments were seeing impact in person — not reading about it, not hearing statistics, but being at the food pantry when the doors open, packing meals and watching the counter climb, standing in a shelter and understanding for the first time that it's the only one in the county.
3. Doing it as a team was half the magic — the relationships formed volunteering alongside someone you'd only ever emailed, the pride of seeing coworkers show up, the way those experiences changed the culture of the office.
4. IAT's role was as an amplifier, not the hero — the match that turned a modest donation into something meaningful, the paid hours that made showing up possible, the quiet infrastructure behind acts that felt entirely personal.

These four truths became the creative north stars for everything that followed.

What Became Possible

Armed with what employees had actually said — in their own language, about their own lives — Myriad developed three distinct creative concepts for IAT to consider. The one they selected, "Making Impact Personal," was built directly around what the survey revealed.

Rather than a traditional interview-based video where employees answered questions about the program, the concept proposed something closer to a conversation — small groups of employees talking with each other about why they give and what it felt like to see impact in person. The format was designed to reflect what the survey had shown: that the most powerful stories at IAT were peer-to-peer, not top-down.

The pre-interviews that followed confirmed and deepened the survey findings. A pattern emerged quickly: every person who gave had a specific moment they could picture. Not a general feeling of doing good. A specific day, a specific place, a specific person or outcome they still carried with them.

What It Gave Them

For IAT employees who watch this video, it functions as recognition — a mirror that reflects back something true about the culture they're already part of. The giving program isn't explained or sold. It's heard, through the voices of people who already know why it matters, speaking in the unguarded way people do when they're talking to each other rather than performing for a camera.

For employees who haven't yet participated, the video does something more important than explain the mechanics. It shows them people like themselves — not executives, not spokespeople — talking about specific, personal reasons for giving and the moments that stayed with them. That's a different kind of invitation than a benefit sheet.

For IAT as an organization, the video is a reflection of something the company has quietly made possible — a culture of giving sustained by real people with real reasons, amplified by a program generous enough to meet them where they are. The methodology didn't manufacture that story. IAT built it. The process just made sure the video found it.

"After sharing the video with employees on our intranet, it was one of our most viewed and engaged with posts," said SVP of Marketing and Communications Caryn Best. "Our giving program is a special benefit and Myriad helped us tell that story from the eyes of our employees – it resonated and is helping us drive more awareness and utilization of the program."