The idea came to me in the bath.
It was March 2021. I was Director of Communications at Target ALS, running all marketing and communications with one urgent problem. The pandemic had frozen fundraising across our entire sector, and I needed to find a way, together with my colleagues, to keep research funding flowing. The dollars we were responsible for raising meant the difference between critical ALS research continuing and going quiet at exactly the wrong moment.
I’d been thinking about Rebecca Luker.
Rebecca was one of Broadway’s great sopranos, a three-time Tony nominee for Show Boat, The Music Man, and Mary Poppins, and an unforgettable Maria in the 1998 revival of The Sound of Music. She was diagnosed with ALS and died in December 2020. And at some point in that bath, deep in thought — half-grieving and half-scheming — a question surfaced. Streaming concerts and performances had become all the rage, although they were generally poorly produced. After all, people didn’t have access to their usual production teams. My question was: how do you build a high-quality fundraising concert that brings many people together, not just one or two performers, at the exact moment when we’re supposed to stay far away from one another?
That question, it turns out, was one many marketers and communicators were quietly facing in 2020 and 2021. Our audiences were isolated, anxious, and grieving, and not only for the people they had lost but for the ordinary closeness of being in a room with fellow human beings. Human contact is critical to mental and physical health. The instinct in our field during a crisis is to go quiet, or to go transactional. Trim the campaign, make the ask, move on. I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted to stretch toward people instead of away from them, and give them a reason to gather, and a place to grieve together, at the one moment gathering felt impossible.
Despite hesitation from many friends and colleagues, I forged on.
Titled “Becca,” the lineup featured some of Rebecca’s closest friends, who had been there with her in her final days, including Judy Kuhn, Victoria Clark, and Jeff Blumenkrantz, as well as other friends like Kristin Chenoweth, Laura Benanti, Kelli O’Hara, Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis, Santino Fontana, and Michael Cerveris. As far as Broadway goes, there’s no higher pedigree. I hadn’t realized it until the day we filmed, but grief had also joined us in that room.
Because of COVID, these beloved friends of Rebecca’s hadn’t had much chance to grieve together. It was a hectic day of filming, but I took note of all the conversations these stars were having in the green room, sharing favorite memories of Rebecca, acknowledging each other’s feelings, and even laughing at points. Besides supporting an important cause, I like to believe I helped support a group of close friends who needed an outlet to remember and honor their beloved Rebecca. That heart truly comes through in their performances.
Filming at Yamaha studios in midtown Manhattan, I brought in a COVID expert to test everyone. We wore masks except when performers were on stage. Anyone who had been exposed, or simply wasn’t comfortable being in the room, took part through video performances instead. Looking back, the whole production is a kind of time capsule of where our culture was in 2021, masked, distanced, and aching to be in a room together.
But here’s the part I care about most.
I didn’t want to do the easy thing, the “a beloved star died, here are some songs in her honor” version. Together with my production partner, UK-based David Mahoney, and writer Sarah Rebell, we made something harder and truer: a story about a woman. A wife and stepmother. A fierce advocate for the causes she believed in. A mentor to the next generation of female Broadway stars. This intention is even reflected in the concert title, "Becca," the name she was known by among family and friends. "Rebecca" was just a piece of her, her Broadway identity.
The clearest example is Laura Benanti. Laura was Rebecca’s understudy as Maria in that The Sound of Music revival, and she took over the role when Rebecca left the production, then went on to become one of the biggest stars in her own right. Later, when Laura finished her run in the Broadway production of Nine, Rebecca took over the role — this time succeeding the woman who had once been her understudy. That’s who Rebecca was. No ego. Just generosity and collaboration, seeing herself as part of a community that held her up as an example in return.
The “Becca” score reflected that. We built the entire concert around music Rebecca had sung during her career, woven together with the narrative of who she was as a person. Not a highlight reel, but a life told in song. The result was a show anyone could relate to, not just Broadway fans, because it was really about a person and not a résumé.
We streamed it three times in a single evening, once each for the UK, East Coast, and the West Coast, so that as many people as possible could sit down and watch it in their own prime time.
In that one night we raised $250,000, which was applied immediately to ALS research projects. Because of this project, and others led by my colleagues, Target ALS became the only ALS organization in America able to continue funding research during the pandemic.
The ripple effects didn’t stop there. Our premier sponsor, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma America, called the next day — so moved by what we’d built that they offered a grant to launch something new: the Rebecca Luker Courage Awards, honoring the professionals, advocates, and patients making a difference in the fight against ALS. One night of streaming had become an ongoing extension of the mission.
Back to grief, those conversations that happened between these stars while we were filming tied directly to my broader hope. What happened in that green room happened on the other side of the screen too. We didn’t raise that money by asking harder. We raised it by building people a place to grieve, a real room, even a virtual one, where thousands of strangers could sit together in their loss and feel a little less alone in it. That is what people needed in that moment, and giving it to them is what funded the cause. And no matter who they were, they could relate. Again, because we wrote the script and curated the score to tell the story of an incredibly dynamic woman, not just a Broadway star. Hopefully, everyone has someone just as special in their own lives.
Looking back, what happened with “Becca” — and the Courage Awards that followed — reflects an approach I’ve come to rely on in every project since: I call it finding The Higher Story. It means resisting the obvious pitch and instead digging for the story that actually connects to culture, to emotion, to the things people already care about. Get that right, and the results follow.
There’s a lesson in this for any brand. Your audience, whether it is a mass audience of millions or a small group of people who hold outsized influence over how the world sees you, is not a segment or a funnel. It is human beings with emotions, motivations, hopes, and dreams. When you stop treating them as a market to convert and start creating real experiences that mean something to them, you make a difference in their lives, and they remember it. Humanize yourself, find a genuine way to create connection, and you win them over. Not for a campaign. For good.
The Higher Story is a series about looking past the surface to the truth underneath: how that shapes the way we see the world, meet our challenges, and, in marketing and communications, do work that lands with more honesty and impact.
Originally published on LinkedIn.