Joining our stories with God’s

Lizzy Standbrook is a storyteller and creative strategist who helps charities to “build strategy around their stories” so they can more effectively share their mission and invite people into it. Her approach is neatly summed up as: “know your story, tell your story, fund your story”. Her skills and experience, gained over 20 years in the charity sector, underpin every aspect of her work. And she is mindful of what it takes to invite in a ‘fresh pair of eyes’: “Some of these organisations are so brave to say, ‘come and look at what we do’…but actually, that’s when we grow, learn and develop.”

Lizzy started her career in purchasing, before moving into marketing and fundraising; working for large charities including the RNIB and, until 2019, The Leprosy Mission. As a result, she has a unique insight into the challenges charities face. And through her creativity and knack for strategic leadership she is able to find resourceful solutions to engage new and existing audiences in authentic ways. “The real story is God’s story…[so] we’re inviting people to join in with what God’s doing,” she says, “And now I’m going into other organisations and showing them how to do that [too].”

Early artistic flair

Since a young age Lizzy’s love of art was nurtured by her creative family: “We always had sketchbooks and paints as kids.” This grew into a thriving artistic practice alongside her wider career. It’s been bolstered by a strong entrepreneurial streak which has seen her selling artwork in pop-up shops, taking on commissions and participating in open studios. Ready to turn her hand to just about anything as the need arises, she has picked up skills encompassing filmmaking, editing, animation and content creation: “I have just always taken opportunities”, she says. “And I say to younger people now, ‘do the things that come your way’.”

Since her 20s Lizzy had wanted to use her art and creativity to help the poor, but she had no idea how that would happen. At The Leprosy Mission her work took her overseas to places like India, which inspired her further. She began to run some of their fundraising campaigns. In 2017 they made their first film. Short-handed she put herself forward to help: “I did the mobile filmmaking…[and] had some training from someone who’d worked for the BBC…I’d never done filmmaking before. But [it all] came together, and the films did really well.”

Lizzy’s parents are Christians, but making her own commitment to Jesus, aged eleven, was a completely independent decision: “I don’t think I told anyone that I’d done that – I just heard the gospel and thought, ‘Yeah, I need that. And I need him.’” She describes her Christian walk as “a journey of growing in confidence, that my story matters. And gaining courage to step out into God’s story – what he’s calling me to.”

A leap of faith

Stepping out in October 2019 to launch her own business seemed totally counterintuitive to Lizzy: “One of my friends said to me, ‘I think you’re being crazy’, because I loved my job. And they saw that it was going well.” It was going really well: “We’d just had a great campaign, the biggest campaign [we’d] ever done, and I’d led that team.” Her decision to leave just after a record-breaking campaign was the result of a “gentle restlessness” she has felt at key moments in her career. Pursuing intimacy with God, and following him, have always taken precedence. As a creative too, she tends to resist being put in a box: “I’ve always had that sense of wanting the freedom to do different things.”

Her decision was also galvanised by some wise counsel from a trusted friend: “I said, ‘I feel like I’m at a place now in my career where I either have to go into strategic leadership or I have to do the creative kind of filmmaking, content-creation campaigns which I love as well. I know that I’m both of those things, and I don’t know how to choose.’ They just said: ‘Why do you have to choose? Why can’t you be both?’” 

She reflects that: “the voices you listen to are really important…As women in the Church it’s quite hard to find those sometimes. But I’ve always prayed about that, and God’s been so good to me, and that was a voice at the right time.”

Still, it was a major leap of faith: “I had a few months where I felt I was free falling”, Lizzy says. But circumstances proved that God was paving the way. Even so, there was pressure to focus exclusively on ‘ticking the boxes’ of launching a business; like writing a business plan, building a website and establishing her own brand: “[but] it never felt like that for me – it felt like God’s gone ahead of me, and, like [in] the rest of my life, I need to lean in and see what opens up”. 

Before the end of the year, she had her first charity clients. And by Christmas another charity approached her to edit some video footage: “it had been shot on location by someone who wasn’t a filmmaker”. It couldn’t be used on its own, but Lizzy had an idea: “I said, ‘Look, you haven’t got a huge budget, but I’ve been thinking about doing some animation; would you be happy for me to use some of my artwork?’ They were a charity that knew me, so said, ‘Yep, go for it’ and that was the first time I used my illustrations. I blended [my] animation with [the footage] using my editing skills, and put the audio behind it. They absolutely loved it. I think it helped people to understand what was powerful about this way of working.”

This approach has become an important aspect of her work, for creating campaigns that resonate powerfully with audiences to ‘cut through’ the noise: “we can get quite emotionally weary, especially in our world at the moment, of all of the images we’re seeing, and it doesn’t necessarily elicit engagement or the opportunity to get involved. When you create an animation that’s quite whimsical…about something quite hard…it draws people in again.”

Lizzy’s process involves scanning in her watercolour illustrations and then creating the movement using software. She has recently branched into digital artwork too: “I’m not Pixar [but] I did do a digitally painted one this year for the first time. It’s got quite a different look; I painted over each scene so it’s quite time intensive, but it was really effective.” It is the very fact that her artwork is hand-drawn and ‘unpolished’, while her films are made to a high professional standard, that make the approach work so well. And each campaign film is totally unique: “because nobody else can paint the way that I paint”.

Enjoying the variety

Growing her business organically has meant Lizzy’s work is suitably diverse; projects range from developing multiple parts of a NGO’s fundraising strategy with its CEO, to working with other organisations on campaigns and content. She sees God’s creativity at work in the variety she enjoys. On one hand: “it’s creative strategy to help organisations to tell their story and invite supporters into it” and on the other: “it’s the creative animation and filmmaking – I’d be lost without both”.

Her campaign films have highlighted stories of poverty, disease and their compounded vulnerabilities for clients including Safe International, ChildHope UK and The Leprosy Mission’s global offices. When she started, Lizzy certainly didn’t expect to be “creating animations which began winning awards”. However, she is now an award-winning animator, having won several; including Best Animated Film at both the 4th Dimension Independent Film Festival, and Calcutta International Cult Film Festival. She was selected for the Social Change Short Films Festival and a semi-finalist at the London International Web & Shorts Film Festival.

But for Lizzy, it’s the individuals and their stories that are most important to her; and those marginalised people she wants to ‘make famous’. So, when Leprosy Mission Scotland entered her film about a leprosy sufferer, entitled ‘Friday’s Story’, into the UK’s Smiley Charity Film Awards, being chosen as finalists wasn’t the main highlight. She shares that: “we were on the red carpet at the Odeon, in Leicester Square, representing this man in Nigeria, who had known so much rejection. And we were able to give him a place of honour.” 

You can find Lizzy Standbrook on LinkedIn, and see her work on YouTube @lizzystandbrook and Instagram @lizzy_storyteller

Words by Alex Noel