ALUMNI STORIES: Michelle ChakkaLAckal
Long before social entrepreneur Michelle Chakkalackal ventured into the world of branding, she knew that to reach people, you had to meet them where they are. As a co-founder of Love Matters, a not-for-profit series of online platforms about safe sex for India, Kenya, Egypt, Mexico and China, Michelle was responsible for the global content strategy that resulted in an average of 3 million visitors a month. Love Matters success was in part due to its pleasure positive approach to sex and sexuality.
Because of her success, Michelle became sought out by other impact entrepreneurs for support on how to build sustainable, impactful ventures. What started as one-off consultancy gigs grew into a consulting business as an Impact Business Designer.
It was through these experiences that Michelle transitioned from founder to independent consultant. And she discovered the power of thinking like a brand strategist.
Michelle is the first person to graduate from Brand The Change Academy as well as the Brand The Change Trainer Certification Programme. She used the tools and methodology both for building the brand for her consultancy business, as well as for the impact design for her clients.
Michelle Chakkalackal
WG: How would you describe what you do today?
MC: I’m a social entrepreneur cum impact business designer (impact strategist + change facilitator). I help social enterprises and non-profits lead systemic change.
I help companies align their (social) impact, business models, leadership capacity, and teams to deliver measurable results at scale.
I see leaders, the teams, and the companies as part of interlinked living systems. Change one part and you have the potential to change the whole.
WG: that sounds like a role that requires deep expertise in the impact space. how did you get THERE?
MC: It was accidental in some ways.
I started off my career in the early 2000s, as an HIV/AIDS researcher working in Namibia, India, and Kenya. When I was working in Nairobi, I worked as a researcher in a health clinic that treated sex workers.
I was there to study whether sex workers were getting HIV from their regular clients, boyfriends, or husbands. Spoiler alert! We found out women working in sex work were more likely getting infected by their husbands than clients.
Trust was putting women at risk of HIV infection. The opposite of what HIV/AIDS campaigns were talking about. Which made me wonder, what was going on?
I noticed a common pattern while working in global health: most problems were tackled in silos. HIV/AIDs was marketed as a problem that mainly affected sex workers, their clients, men who have sex with men, and drug users. Politically and culturally, this was easier to accept. The behaviour of a few people put a larger population at risk.
But what happens if the risky behaviour is done by a greater proportion of the population: straight men and women in trusting and long-standing relationships, who engage in multiple relationships at the same time? And what happens if this behaviour becomes privately tolerated? Like an open secret. Don't ask. Don't tell.
“I realised to work with the root causes of a problem, you need different skills, perspectives, and diverse people. You need the ability to see, map, and work with a system. This is also the foundation to see and measure social impact.”
I co-founded my first social enterprise, a global health magazine at the University of Toronto called Juxtaposition, with my best friend Kadia Petricca.
At the heart of Juxtaposition was the awareness that we need to bring together diverse actors, break down silos, and champion multi-disciplinary approaches to address systems problems. The magazine still exists today, going 17+ years strong.
It is safe to say that while our magazine and my pilot project in Nairobi didn’t cure HIV/AIDS, it did plant the seed of what it meant to work in the field of social enterprise.
To work in this space, I needed to have the courage to see things as they are, not as I wanted them to be. To be successful, I needed to meet people where they were.
WG: That’s exactly how we define ‘thinking like a brand strategist’.
MC: Yes! So, fast forward to Love Matters*, the next social enterprise I co-founded.
Love Matters is a series of sexual websites and social media platforms that deliver pleasure-positive sexual health information to young people between the ages of 18 to 30. The original focus was on young people who lived in India, Mexico, Venezuela, Kenya, China, and Egypt; countries where this information was taboo and or censored. Later on, this branched out to other countries.
What was interesting back then, as I was the same age as my audience – under 30. Normally, in the non-profits/social enterprises/development sector, it was not run by people who were also the constituents or beneficiaries of the programs. Decision-makers were not the same age as their target audience, nor did they have deep personal roots connected with the programs they run. Nowadays, this has changed, for the better.
Michelle and her sisters
I’m a South-Indian Canadian. I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, in a strict traditional South-Indian family. This meant braids down to my butt, full sideburns, no friends coming over after school, no sleepovers, no boyfriends. Yes, to homework, good grades, and extracurriculars that would look good on a med school application. I lived like many immigrants with the pressure of what would people think if you colored outside of the lines.
I worked in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa in my early 20s and was very familiar with the challenges of being the ‘in-between generation': between ‘Western’ and also from the Global South.
That’s a particular tension, and because I had worked in the field early on with some heavyweights - Richard B Lee, Rupert Kaul, and Prabhat Jha, I had the insider knowledge of what were no-go zones in public health, non-profits, and epidemiology.
The no-go zones were talking about sex and sexuality in a positive manner AND including straight men. You could get lots of money to scare people to death about sex and sexuality and aim this at women, girls, men who have sex with men, injection drug users, but not for that powerful majority: straight men and the middle class.
Michelle talking about what it takes to put pleasure on the sexual education agenda
It was difficult to persuade budgets and programming to talk about sex and sexuality and include the full spectrum of what people wanted and didn’t want. People wanted to know how to love, have a meaningful life, and have happiness. They wanted to have orgasms, satisfying relationships, and be able to make informed decisions about having a family or getting married.
The difference was, in the media you could approach the topic because these topics weren’t taboo. The stakes were lower.
So I started to write accurate sexual health information injected with the things I wished I had known, for young people by young people. I made sure it was in an accessible language that respected young people as equals. Make no mistake, doing that alone was not enough. You need to do this AND know how to sell content AND have an incredible team.
Having a massive social impact doesn’t have to be curing AIDS. It can be as simple as breaking down communication barriers, offering valuable information that people can use, and that makes them feel good.
My role as co-founder over the years morphed into a hybrid of VP of Product including content, fundraising, R&D, and impact. Over the course of 7+ years, I helped grow our operations from 3 people to 65+ globally. I raised about 3 million USD in funds. Our products conservatively reached between 10-30 million people. By the time I left, our sites averaged about 3 million visitors a month and we had more than 7.5 million social media followers.
Then in 2017, I left and started a new journey.
WG: WHAT MADE YOU LEAVE?
MC: I’m happiest when I’m starting, building, and scaling. I only realized that once Love Matters was successful. I love working with people building something new, something that doesn’t exist yet but could.
Once you’re running a steady operation and responsible for incremental change that produces repeatable results year after year, I lost interest. I could do it, but I wasn’t happy.
What I loved was being able to translate a vision into something real and valuable to others. If that meant building systems, processes, spreadsheets, learning finances etc. I would do it.
That said, I am not a die-hard ops person.
Ops people are a very special breed. They are worth every single dollar, euro, peso, schilling you spend. If your backend is running smoothly without effort, it is due to their hard efforts. If I had the luxury of being an end-user of their hard work, I would have done that. But when you are strapped for cash and growing, there isn't anyone else but you.
For those experiences, I am forever grateful because they gave me the gift of discipline. But I didn't want to be known for that alone.
WG: how did you think about brand and branding before encountering brand the change?
MC: I thought branding was something you did once you got the money in from your business. It was nice to have, instead of a must-have.
I came from the understanding that the product and service needed to work, and you needed to have a certain amount of reach and funding before you brought branding in.
I understood branding as window dressing. But the truth is, some window dressing really made you buy the home.
I just couldn’t tell why something was good or bad. So at the start, I devalued branding because I didn’t understand it.
WG: How did you begin to use brand thinking in your impact work?
MC: I began to use the Brand the Change guidebook for an off-label purpose.
Michelle with Laura Talsma, co-founder of Paygo Energy
To help a client start difficult discussions around organizational design, as they moved from seed to series A.
Branding was an easier entry point to open up organizational design questions and venture building in a less threatening manner, so I seized the opportunity.
What I learned along the way, at the beginning branding, business building, and impact starting from the same core.
Mission, Vision, and Values.
I can scan an entire company based on those 3 statements and see where there is misalignment across different sectors. Mission, Vision, and Values became one way to show senior management the path forward when discussing strategic decisions.
The main difference I noticed between myself and how other brand specialists used branding was when I connected branding to tangible business trade-offs: revenue, operational person-hours, hiring and firing staff, impact, as well as marketing, growth, etc.
Simply by looking at your vision, I could see what you were aiming for your measurable impact to be. Or by looking at your mission, I could tell what your operational challenges would be, and how this would affect your ability to get results.
So it became more valuable for me to understand branding better. Plus, I wanted to know how branding was really supposed to be used for.
WG: Why did you join 'brand the change academy?
MC: When I left Love Matters, I didn’t know who I had become.
“My identity was wrapped in what I co-founded. I think a lot of founders can relate to this. ”
I did not have the language to describe what I had done. I was so busy doing things, that it didn’t matter from what field the tools came from, my focus was X needed to get done.
I had spent a couple of years as a consultant or as interim COO, and it was through lots of reflection and working with new people that I understood what I had done and contributed to the world.
But that’s not what brought me to Brand the Change Academy.
It’s what led me to call Anne.
WG: Why was that?
I had an urgent fire to put out. Potential clients wanted to see my website and testimonials. I had no website and no public testimonials. All my work came through word of mouth and through spontaneous meetings, many for whom my track record at Love Matters was enough.
However, for people outside of my immediate network of friends and one node further, I needed to show I was a legitimate company. I needed to build a website, have cases, and testimonials as social proof.
Having led a website redesign and content strategy for Love Matters and other digital platforms before, I was sort of stumped why was it so hard for me to do this for ME?
I like many founders or entrepreneurs just thought I could bang out my story, offerings, and connect it to a website. Voila! it would be done.
Graduation cheers for Class Two of the Brand The Change Trainer Certification Programme
Well, humbly said, 1.5 years later I’m still on that road.
In that process, I worked with fellow BTC facilitator Maja Grcic. She was incredible at kick-starting my journey towards a personal brand. I wholeheartedly kicked and screamed through the process (on the inside, because I’m Canadian). She has been kindly reconnecting from time to time to see how it’s going.
But really, I joined the BTC facilitators program because I still thought I could just do it myself instead of hiring someone.
Yes, I am just that stubborn.
I still thought after my sessions with Maja, I could engineer my own brand by reading the book, taking the facilitation course, by facilitating branding processes for others.
That's why I joined the academy.
So to anyone reading this, save yourself the trouble. Just join Brand the Change Academy.
WG: What did the academy bring you?
MC: It changed how I positioned myself (and my business), how I presented myself (my story), how I saw as my clients and who my collaborators were.
The academy also brought me through a process that helped me make sense of my own story, first to myself. From there, I felt confident that I could share a story with others that was authentic.
WG: What were some of the challenges along the way?
MC: One of my biggest challenges was understanding positioning. Specifically how to position myself in a sea of other consultants and small agencies.
The other challenge was my stubbornness.
By now, you’ve figured out that I’m a systems person.
I need to see the whole, the parts, and how everything connects. It’s from this place I can execute and create measurable results.
Since all of my business was word of mouth, I hadn’t done any of the hard work of really understanding my market, who my clients were, and what role(s) am I was being hired for. And ask myself, do I want that?
People came to me through an introduction kind of like, “I know an X who could help you with that.” Two of my clients came simply from a MasterMind Whatsapp group while I was travelling to Nairobi for another client. I thought this was how life would always be.
My hope was that this strategy of me ‘not selling myself’ would continue into 2020. But 2020 was the year of reckoning for me, like many of us.
My work overseas halted.
My existing clients - social enterprises and start-ups - were struggling. Most turned inward and relied on bootstrapping their operations, cutting down on their own staff’s salaries, or furloughing their employees to keep afloat. What little resources they had, were spent on keeping the lights on and putting out fires. Gone where the team-building sessions, deep creative work, and venture building activities.
2020 gave me the gift of constraints.
I had to make choices. Choices about what I was doing and selling.
I also had to call my own bullshit out and do something that I found scary. This meant selling myself and my services, rather than selling an image of a company I dreamed up, and then me and the services I provided.
I struggled with the insight and realisation that I was the product and service…
To be honest, I did not like this insight.
When Anne and Maira gave me this frank feedback that people were hiring me for me, it scared me.
I wanted to hide behind an image that I put in my head, about I'm working at this company, and this company is being hired to do that job. When in fact, this company was me.
I had plenty of excuses to not make a decision towards branding myself as an independent consultant. Anne and Maira patiently weighed out the pros and cons with me in the academy, between branding myself as a company vs. independent consultant. Maybe you recognize some of these (valid) excuses:
My name is long and hard to write – Michelle Chakkalackal. So that shouldn't be the name of my company.
Counter: it makes you 100 per cent more memorable.The world is a racist place and branding my company with my name will backfire.
Counter: if you want to work in systems change, you need to show yourself.I don’t want people to google me and associate any failures with my company.
Counter: you are your company, so if that’s the case – it’s already there.I’m scared.
Counter: everyone is.
What got me in the end, was the logic I had learned across my career: meet people where they are. People are hiring me for me, so why not accept it?
Why make your potential clients work hard to hire you?
Why ask them to go to an unknown company website, find me in the about us, then ask them to come set up a meeting to potentially hire me?
“As they say in UX/UI: one click is better than three.”
That said, I have bought the URLs for my fictitious boutique company, just in case. Always do that.
I have started owning my own work under my name. Fellow BTC Academy fellow, Kelcey Braine, has been my co-conspirator on this journey. She’s currently working on my brand identity.
I wouldn’t be where I am without her. I wouldn’t have met her unless I joined the Academy.
Our time zones are bananas. She’s in New Zealand, and I’m in Amsterdam. But it works.
WG: What would your dream client look like / who would they be?
MC: There are many. Here are a few:
Foundations: World Wide Web, Mozilla, Wikimedia, The African Visionary Fund, Opportunity Collaborate, and DRK Foundation.
Organizations: MIT Media Lab, SSIR, MIT Tech Review, Zebra Co-op, This is Memento, It’s nice that.
Non-profits: MSF, HIVOS, Bioneers, HOT (Humanitarian OpenStreet Maps) and On Being.
Personal Brands: Maurice Cherry, Lizzo, Questlove, Shehzil Malik, Rick Rubin.
WG: What has been the biggest surprise on this branding journey?
MC: The better I learned how to sell myself, the easier it became to support and sell others.
When you know who you are, what really matters to you, how you want to work, it really changes the way you approach everything.
It changed how I approached business. It changed how I see success and my role in the big picture. It also changed how I saw competitors because in some cases I needed them to reach my vision.
There is room for us all.
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