Hello Human: How A PR Firm Found their Footing
The founder of global public relations agency Hello, Human sits down with Skopos to talk about reimagining PR for creatives, seeking out a financial partner, and launching—and growing—a business during the pandemic.
Jenny Nyugen: Throughout my career, I’ve worked on all aspects of PR. I’ve worked the editorial side, receiving pitches from publicists; I’ve been on the client side of hiring PR agencies; I’ve worked in PR agencies; and I’ve had a PR agency, which has allowed me to see PR from every stakeholders point of view.
Prior to Hello, Human, I had an agency called Melting Butter Studios. When we first started, we were working on these high culture, low budget kinds of projects—really beautiful projects that I’ll always remember...but they didn't keep the lights on. And eventually, like all agency models, we ended up looking for bigger corporate clients who could sustain us, so that’s naturally the direction we went, working with big tech and property brands.
Brooklyn Based, Community Focused
Humanizing Finance since 2016
When people ask what the most important support has been for Hello, Human, my response is always the same: Elli’s support with the financial part . . . Since everyone’s always asking me to recommend them to Skopos, one of the campaign rewards is a sit-down financial strategy session with Elli.
When the pandemic hit, all of those projects disappeared. But it gave me a blank slate to think about why I do what I do. What’s the most interesting type of work I’ve done, and who do I really want to work with? I realized I wanted to work with my creative community; designers who I was friends with and who had never been able to afford my services before. I thought, there has to be a more mutually viable and beneficial way to work together that’s not a situation where you’re doing a favor for a friend.
I looked at PR as one crucial service for a small business and I broke the process apart to figure out why it costs so much money to work with an agency. And when I did that, I found that much of the work is hand holding the client, and administrative tasks like wrangling files into press kits and what not. It seemed apparent that there was a smarter way to do business, where we provide a streamlined service by focusing on the high-value work, which is me figuring out what the story is, sending it out to the right people, following up, and trying to place the story somewhere. And that all of the sudden opened up the idea of Hello, Human, by looking for mutually beneficial ways to work with the creative community.
Then I started to rewrite the process.
