1Community is an entertainment production company with a C3 social impact studio. Their thesis: when entertainment creates emotional openings, strategic experiential design turns feeling into measurable action and scalable movements.
Six months after NONNAS (produced by 1Community) was released on Netflix (November 2025), we saw an independent opportunity to innovate around how commercial entertainment could serve social good.
Entertainment has the power to spark conversation, but too often that engagement ends when the credits roll. We recognized that a film's cultural resonance extends far beyond its release window; past the screening and panel discussions. Independent of Netflix’s promotional partnership, 1Community tapped Think True to challenge this model.
We asked: how do we create an experiential activation that brings social justice themes to life through direct interaction, and prove it's replicable as a model for any commercial entertainment property?
Our Objectives:
Targets:
The campaign's success would be measured not simply by reach or awareness, but by its ability to turn audiences into active participants, build lasting community infrastructure, and create a model for impact-driven entertainment.
Research shows loneliness is rising across all age groups, with Gen Z and Boomers reporting some of the highest levels of social isolation. And at the same time, both generations crave meaningful intergenerational connection. Yet, most impact campaigns tied to entertainment focus on awareness and conversation rather than creating opportunities for meaningful connection.
We asked: what if we could harness that cultural resonance, independent of commercial promotion, to build actual community infrastructure? What if commercial entertainment could become infrastructure for social change?
That insight became Grandma's House, an immersive experience inspired by the themes of NONNAS that transformed passive audiences into active participants.
The activation was built the belief that lasting impact occurs when audiences are given tangible pathways to turn emotion into action. Rather than asking people to simply consume a story, Grandma's House invited them to experience its values through shared moments of connection, conversation, and community participation.
Three principles guided the strategy:
1. Live Experiential Design (The Catalyst) Grandma's House extended NONNAS' emotional truth: We built a house so people could feel at home.
The activation unfolded across three rooms, each curated by Los Angeles matriarchs (Fran Jemmott, Odilia Romero, Pauline Bunt, Chef Fatima Juarez), not actors, but real community leaders. Guests didn't observe; they participated: cooking, playing traditional games, writing letters to isolated seniors, calling estranged family on rotary phones, pinning their family's migration journey on a world map.
This wasn't film marketing. Every touchpoint was designed around genuine human connection and documented actions we could track, measure, and replicate.
2. Strategic Amplification (Creating National Scale) We intentionally designed Grandma's House to generate earned media impact far beyond LA through cultural authenticity, not studio promotional power:
3. Infrastructure Building (Enabling Replication) Critically, we built systems designed for scalability beyond this single event:
How We Overcame Challenges:
Challenge: Proving this works independent of studio marketing and platform support
Solution: Generated 27.3M earned media impressions and replication requests through cultural authenticity and community partnerships, not promotional budgets.
Challenge: Creating authentic experiences that aren't exploitative or performative
Solution: Centered real matriarchs as partners and decision-makers, not talent. Aligned all activations with their actual values and communities.
Challenge: Scaling impact from 400 attendees without studio backing
Solution: Designed media partnerships, influencer engagement, and social strategy to extend the 400-person experience nationally.
Grandma's House proved our independent model for transforming commercial entertainment into social infrastructure, independent of traditional studio marketing. We created a platform for participation and proved storytelling can create measurable community connection, lasting engagement, and real-world action.
The activation welcomed more than 400 attendees, surpassing its attendance goal by up to 100%, and reached capacity two weeks before opening. More importantly, participants didn't simply experience the activation; they acted. The event generated 545 meaningful actions onsite, including handwritten letters and phone calls reconnecting loved ones across 20 states.
The campaign also proved the scalability of the model. Following the activation, organizations in three cities reached out seeking to bring Grandma's House to their own communities, validating the objective of creating a replicable framework. Netflix is also now in discussions with 1Community for a NONNAS sequel and additional content directly tied to the activation's cultural impact.
The experience successfully transformed a one-time activation into lasting community infrastructure. Think True helped grow 1Community's SMS audience to more than 2,800 subscribers, exceeding its goal by 180% and creating an owned platform for future engagement and action.
Post-event surveys demonstrated measurable behavioral impact: 72% percent of attendees reported feeling more connected to their community, while 89% committed to strengthening intergenerational relationships.
The campaign generated 27.3 million earned media impressions across outlets including CBS LA, FOX LA, LAist, and Los Angeles Magazine, alongside more than 400,000 social impressions.
Most importantly, Grandma's House proved that impact and entertainment are not competing goals, they amplify one another.
