"Employees of the workshop actually participate physically in our purpose. “Clearly, many of the people who work within our organization are charged with implementing incredible initiatives that help kids," Chambers says. He views the Sesame Workshop team as partners within the organization, rather than as employees. "From that, our strategies become more dictated because if we're going to help them, we have to develop the content to do it.”Īligning the Sesame Workshop Workforce with its purposeĬhambers encourages organizations to do what they can to engage their workforces and organizational culture around a certain mission to take it out into the world and activate it. "It all starts from asking how can we help kids today and kids of tomorrow succeed? How can we help them be better people?, How can we help them be smarter, stronger, and kinder?" Chambers says. In terms of creating and using benchmark, Chambers wholeheartedly agrees that the brand's core purpose drives everything their team does. Sesame Workshop's evolution relies heavily upon sound decision-making. "It's not a 'once every five years' kind of thing," Chambers says. "A few months back, we hit 10 million subscribers."īecause of such technological breakthroughs and phenomena, Sesame Workshop is constantly looking at technology, children's needs, their content consumption habits, and in this way, the team continues to evolve along with technology. "Today, roughly 15 years later, we're the number 14 YouTube channel of all YouTube channels," Chambers points out. They realized it was a way to reach more kids. Digitizing of all existing Sesame Street videos began, and then YouTube launched, sparking the team's interest. That approach seeps into all aspects of the organization, whether it's our distribution strategy or our partnership strategy or our licensing strategy.”Ĭhambers views the show’s practice of cultural listening as imperative to discovering ways to connect with viewers, not only to consider what issues they tackle, but how to stay relevant through technological opportunities as well.Ĭase in point: In 2005, Sesame Workshop was experimenting with digital video and at the time, the team's thinking was that their website was going to become the Sesame Street Channel. “We build the show from the ground up each season based on what we’ve learned from the past, and so we don't literally start over, but we absolutely evolve. “We bring in experts on various topics, whether that’s the environment, autism, math, or literacy,” Chambers continues. The process then continues for each country where Sesame Street is broadcast. And we use that word frequently: experiment.”Ĭhambers explains how every year Sesame Workshop hosts what it calls a curriculum seminar, where the team works with experts in child development, to prioritize and identify a couple of key needs in a particular geographic region. “In fact, even the production of each season of the television show is seen as an experiment. “Organizationally, we look at Sesame Street as a constant evolution,” says Chambers. How does the Sesame Workshop know when it’s time to evolve its themes, content, and approach? Is it about cultural listening? Expertise? Technological prowess? In the Israeli version of “Sesame Street” (Rechov Sumsum), the show introduced Mahboub, an Arab-Israeli Muppet who spoke both Arabic and Hebrew, and who worked to ease tensions between different groups on the show, in order to teach understanding and tolerance.Ĭookie Monster has even taken up healthier eating - and gone on the talk show circuit to encourage his young adherents to do the same.
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