Hal Coopersmith: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, the New York Press Club Award-winning podcast. Highlighting the most interesting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith. And this is our producer and paralegal, Andrew Kane. Hello, Andrew.
Andrew Kane: Hi, Hal. We have a big interview today,
Hal Coopersmith: Andrew. That’s right. We do. You may have heard some bad press about New York City since the pandemic started.
Andrew Kane: I have certainly been here in Brooklyn since March, and we’ve seen thousands slip into poverty, restaurants close and many lifelong New Yorkers move out of the city.
Hal Coopersmith: Well, our guest heard a lot of those things as well, and he decided to do something about it. Today we’re speaking to the founder of the NY Forever campaign, something that’s designed to highlight New York’s strength, resiliency, and encourage New Yorkers to give back, here’s Jonathan Rosen.
Jonathan Rosen: The pledge is really simple. I think it expresses kind of values that I think most New Yorkers would see in their city of the city’s resilience and grit and commitment to each other and to our neighborhoods. And it also acknowledges that it’s not just enough to recover.
Hal Coopersmith: I can’t imagine a better place to talk about NY Forever than the New York Launch Pod. And there is a lot that Jonathan talks about in this episode that will inspire you. But before we go to the interview, we have a sponsor RezCue New York’s premier residential rental compliance platform. Are you a landlord who has rented out residential property in New York State? If so, odds are that you are not compliant with the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act enacted by New York State in 2019. And if you don’t follow the law, your tenant may be able to stay in the property beyond the length of the lease. That would be bad news, Andrew, wouldn’t it.
Andrew Kane: Yes it would.
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NY Launch Pod: So right now is the perfect moment for this NY Forever campaign. Jonathan, how did this come to be?
Jonathan Rosen: Sure. So, this started with complaining on text messages with my friends in the PR industry over the summer, about how down so much of the media narratives seemed to be in New York City. I have a really close friend named Risa Heller who runs her own PR firm, Risa Heller Communications. And she and I were literally moaning about like the 18th New York Times story we read about everyone should move to Maplewood and how to move to the suburbs and is New York City dead.
NY Launch Pod: Or move to lower tax states?
Jonathan Rosen: Sure. Yes. All those things. And so, you know, our thought was, how do we stand up and cheerlead for New York? How do we kind of, you know, we’re marketers and communicators. That’s what we do. How do we lend whatever help we can to burnish the brand of the city we love and our businesses are in and that we’re raising our families? And so, from there, we started talking to many of our other colleagues in PR and marketing, both agencies and on client side became a weekly conference call and lots of ideas were kicked around. And what sort of emerged was the idea of building a brand campaign, but not just a feel good campaign, but a campaign that would ask people to really step up and commit to playing an active role in the city’s recovery that everyone has a role to play in making the city better. We love the place we want it to be. I think there’s a lot of people who have enormous hearts and a lot of generosity and, charitable giving in the city’s been way up this year, which was awesome, but there’s an enormous amount of need. And coming out of COVID, you know, from restaurants, the grind of business to massive unemployment food insecurity, we want to think about ways that New Yorkers could step up. So we built this around the idea of a pledge to New York. Our goal is to get half a million people online through social. It’s a very, Instagram sort of first campaign to sign this pledge, commit to being part of New York Forever. And what that means is committing to sort of being a current active citizen engaged in the city’s future.
NY Launch Pod: So it’s clear that you are passionate about New York. You talked about how you were texting with your colleagues in PR and marketing, but according to you and everyone knows this, there are 8 million people in New York. Why were you and Risa the two to start this campaign?
Jonathan Rosen: Well, look, there’s tons of people doing all sorts of things. I mean, there’s been amazing initiatives that have come out of this moment. I think as there always are, like New York history is replete with moments of peril where lots of people step up. You know, one thing we were inspired by, we found a cover of New York Magazine from 1975. So it said we’ve got to help ourselves and it was all about the civic initiatives. And you’ve seen that across the city, whether it’s mutual aid groups that have popped up in neighborhoods that help people with rent, GoFundMe campaigns for their medical bills. There’s an amazing organization that grew out of the pandemic that we’re partnering with called Roar, which is helping support restaurants across the whole city and Roar didn’t exist until the pandemic and restaurant owners came together to advocate for relief for these small businesses that are really the lifeblood of every neighborhood. We all have our local restaurants we love. So I think there have been countless initiatives to help in different ways. Everyone in life has their like one skill or hopefully, and ours is hopefully comms and marketing. And so our thought was that like, this is what we could lend. So, we’ve had some really great partners in the effort to which I should also, I mean, we very early on took our idea to Julie Samuels. Who’s the founding director of Tech NYC, which is really a trade association of all the major tech companies kind of at every stage in the city, Emily Amadou, who works at Verizon Media and just does incredible marketing and comms there. Uh, Richard Mummy, who’s been our creative director and people very quickly got on board. And we went to a creative agency in lower Manhattan called Baerdis that does some of the edgiest creative work in fashion and sneakers and said, do you want to sign the brand for this campaign for free? And they were like, yes, what can we help with let’s do it? So, you know, I think we’ve been banking on a quite evident generosity of spirit of so many New Yorkers. And our experience has been that like that’s for now, you know, even with the celebrity partners, who’ve asked to be involved. Usually when you start a campaign, it’s very hard to get notable people to drop what they’re doing and do something, especially over the holidays. We put out a hundred and some asks thinking, we’d get, you know, 10 or 11 people. We got a hundred. So, you know, from major sports teams, the Yankees, the Mets, and NYCFC to Broadway, to TV, to movies, it’s been really overwhelming and speak straight to how committed everyone is to the city.
NY Launch Pod: You’ve talked about your corporate partners, how you were able to get celebrities signed up. I certainly had questions about that, but just going back to my original question, people want to know why Jonathan Rosen was the one who’s starting this. What motivated you internally, aside from your one skill of PR and saying, I want to make a difference?
Jonathan Rosen: Sure. Starting, Risa and I both talked. There’s a guy who maybe some of your listeners may have heard of probably not but New York city is full of people who make enormous marks on the city that you many New Yorkers don’t know. There’s a guy named Jay Kriegel. So if you don’t know who that is, you should go look up his obituary from last year who was really a mentor to Risa and I, and a whole generation of folks. He was John Lindsay’s chief of staff in his early twenties in the 1960s and had a really storied civic career in New York. And led with Dan Doctoroff for his Olympic bid for the 2012 Olympics. And he unfortunately passed away about a year ago. You know, a lot of it was sort of like, what would Jay have done? Like this city has a rich history of patriots of people, you know, who sort of stepped up and took responsibility. So both Risa and I, and all of our partners have like a love affair at the city. I grew up, like a lot of people I didn’t grow up here, I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, always with kind of like a face pressed against the glass, wanting to get up the turnpike to New York, came here for law school 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, and I knew I was never going to leave. I have two great kids who are products of the New York City public school system. And I just feel an enormous debt to the city and a real commitment to doing whatever we can to help the city, not just come back. Cause I’m sure that it will come back, but thrive better than before.
NY Launch Pod: So it’s an expression of your New York City patriotism. I love it. Let’s talk about the pledge that people are signing online. What is it? And what’s in it?
Jonathan Rosen: So when we were talking over the summer with our sort of extended extended crew, some of the individuals I mentioned and others, our thought was like, what’s the organizing principle here? How do we get people kind of in the door? Cause we had a bunch of ideas that I think we’re already seeing and you’re going to see as part of the campaign, which is, you know, spurring people, volunteerism and civic commitments, spurring people to give money to people in need, but we want it to kind of organize it around one central idea. And we almost thought it was like a pledge of allegiance to New York and its future. So the pledge is really simple. It kind of, I think it expresses kind of values that I think most New Yorkers would see in their city of the city’s resilience and grit and commitment to each, between each other and to our neighborhoods. And it also acknowledges that it’s not just enough to recover. I think one of the things we’ve all seen this year is many of the inequities in our city, racial, economic, well, they’ve always been there. I think we’re just in such stark relief, looking at disparate impact of COVID in terms of medical outcomes and deaths and spread of the disease and so much of the impact of unemployment. And so the pledge talks about how it’s not enough just to come back, but we’ve got to come back better and more equitable than before. It celebrates the talent and resilience of New Yorkers. And it asks people to make equipment and to sort of pledge their name to staying here. I don’t just mean in a physical sense, but like pledging to stay kind of in mind and spirit, emotionally and physically, obviously to stay involved and to stay active and to commit to playing an active role in the city’s future. So that’s the idea behind it. If you sign it kind of the brass tacks are we’re going to be starting this week, actually reaching out to signers about ways they can tangibly in small ways or big ways play a role in New York City’s revitalization that could range from a small contribution to Roar’s restaurant worker fund, to New York Forever t-shirt which will be launching in a few weeks or it could range to a really big thing. You know, we’re talking to an organization called IMentor, which is New York City founded but works with in Chicago, Boston and New York high school students in public high schools. And they look for mentor pairs to pair up one-to-one and three-year commitments through someone’s end of high school beginning of college experience, they’re looking to really expand their pool of mentors over the next year. There’s an article in the New York Times, just this week about how devastating COVID has been to mentorship programs. It’s been hard for people to come and get together and be together that Big Brothers and others run. So, you know, I think one thing we would hope to do is maybe bring that opportunity to somebody who’s motivated to play a role. We have a great partnership with New York Cares, which I think is actually a very perfect partner. I mean, they emerged after 9/11, another period in New York’s history where our future was not a given and New Yorkers had to really come together. And yeah, the animating idea behind New York Cares was connecting New Yorkers to two ways they can serve. They were one of our earliest and most encouraging conversations. And so as part of that partnership, people who signed the pledge, we’re going to work to connect them to service opportunities to New York Cares and their neighborhood or workforce citywide.
NY Launch Pod: You talked about how it’s a branding campaign pumping up New Yorkers, and I can certainly feel that energy. You talked about how you want to engage half a million New Yorkers on your pledge. We talk a lot about this on the podcast, but what are some of the key performance indicators, those KPIs that you’re going to say, you know, that we have achieved the things that we want.
Jonathan Rosen: Sure. So I think it’s both quantitative and qualitative, for many of the startup founders who are on your pod and listened to it who are in the for-profit business, we’re looking at time on our website, unique visits, monthly and daily unique visitors and the rate of social sharing and video sharing. So, we are tracking against goals to organically grow those platforms. We haven’t spent any money promoting our digital accounts yet. We’ve gotten some great in kind digital advertising support. That’s going to start soon from Google and from Facebook, but it’s sort of a very kind of specific goal to grow the audience and then qualitatively for each of the engagements and activations. We both have sort of specific goals. You know, we are going to launch a New York Forever T-shirt the first of a set of merch that drops with the fashion industry that we’re putting together for each of them. We have a sales goal to drive revenue, to Roar. And then I think really concretely through our civic partnerships with New York Cares as well as Citizens Committee for New York City and hopefully IMentor, we want to be able to identify how many volunteers we drove to these opportunities. So I think we’ll know if we’re successful if we’re tracking towards that half a million people goal over the few months. We see this as a year long campaign for 2021. I mean, this is not both Risa and I, and all of our colleagues, this is not our day job. We’re all sort of doing this as volunteers on the side. Our hope is that this is a year long effort and that we can hopefully pass this brand. And this list off to another civic organization to take up the mantle.
NY Launch Pod: How many volunteer hours are you looking to get? Let’s get a number, let’s get New Yorkers pumped up for how much they should volunteer.
Jonathan Rosen: I mean we’re hopeful that it will be any tens of thousands that we can generate. I think we’re still sort of modeling it out and some of these opportunities are much heavier than others, but look I think there’s a million volunteer hours to be found through this campaign. And that’s something we’re really, really excited about the possibility of doing. And I think there’s that. And I think hopefully also real fundraising that could be directed to New Yorkers most in need. We’ve been super excited to partner with Roar and their restaurant relief fund. I mean, food service workers have been at the tip of the sphere of impact economically, many of them don’t have immigration status and access to public benefits. And there’s an article in the New York Times, just this morning as I was getting ready for this, about the new faces of homelessness in New York City. And it featured a guy who for many, many years had worked at a fairly prominent steakhouse in Manhattan in the kitchen. And now he’s living literally under a bridge in Queens. So we want to also help Marshall the compassion of New Yorkers to get aid where it’s needed most.
NY Launch Pod: There’s a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of energy, I think among new Yorkers to bring New York back, you have been able to develop what seems to be a very sophisticated and well connected organization very quickly in all of this. How did you do that?
Jonathan Rosen: So, our little steering committee that sort of came together over the summer and fall, which was the folks that I mentioned plus many, many more, too many to mention.
NY Launch Pod: All your friends?
Jonathan Rosen: And Risa and Julie’s, it was a big, this is not just my, this is a collective effort. I want to really emphasize that we started to just make a list of people to go to for different pieces. So, you know, Tech NYC, helps to have the tech community in New York City, and they bought Salesforce and Ron Conway and Google and Squarespace and Gibson Dunn is our pro bono counsel. And they were all happy to help. Richard, our creative director had helped build and launch a number of startups. Risa and I represent a number of the companies that were early corporate partners. So I mean, in a lot of ways, this was like an old fashioned barn raising of sort of everyone kind of made a list of, we had a Google Doc open on the call of who could go to whom and what the ask was. I think in ways that will probably resonate with more typical startup founders on your pod. You know, we had the pitch deck, I honed our rap and tried to put together a vision of how people could participate. And it did come together quickly even though it was a lot of months kind of searching for what the it was, but once we landed on it, you know, the fundraising largely occurred in a six week sprint and the celebrity outreach, maybe even shorter a four week sprint, including two of those weeks being the weeks around Christmas and New Year’s. And it was super inspiring. I mean to see, like Jerry Seinfeld over Christmas, at his house tape a thing for us and send it to us. People were super generous. I think the takeaway for us was that people are passionate about the city. This is not a hard thing to get people to want to play a role in. I think it’s kind of knowing who to get to to ask them, asking and giving them a concrete thing they can do. That’s immediate, right? Like people want to do something that they feel like they’re making a very clear ask, it’s actionable, you’re gonna follow up. And if they do it, it’ll be productive. So, you know, with all the celebrities and corporate partners, and we’ve had a very like, will you make this video? We get a very simple prompt video. We tried to make it as frictionless as possible, put a video editor on standby, we put these videos together and then we went back to each of them and their managers and their agents and their brands to say, all right, now we can help promote it. So yesterday we launched our sports video and we put together a whole set of players and fans from New York’s major teams. And then we went back to the team and said, will you help promote it again? Like it’s a pretty low ask to say, will you share a video with your own franchise player? And that’s kind of been the experience. It’s also been one of these things when you tell people the idea, everyone’s doing it because they believe in the city, people are happy to open up their networks. I think in a way to like guard their networks for business purposes, like the ask was make a minute and a half video for New York, share it, with fashion brands, it was make an object that could be something iconic from New York, that’s branded. And I mean, today we released our fashion video today, but the guys at Public School Aurora James, Todd Snyder, Alex Mill. I mean so many great brands were just like, yes, like we’re a New York based fashion brand, we believe in a creative industry here, we’ll make a shirt, we’ll make a hat. And the fact that all the proceeds are going to restaurant worker relief, that sealed the deal.
NY Launch Pod: So you talked about how you and your friends and their friends were able to raise this barn quickly, that it’s certainly an initiative that you guys are looking for in 2021. What do you think the future holds for NY Forever in 2022 and beyond?
Jonathan Rosen: We hope that New York is reopen and healthy and our schools are open and everyone’s vaccinated and our unemployment rate is down and things are great. And that this can become more of an effort to shine a light on so much of the good work that came of this period and help them continue brass tax organizationally. Like, as I said before, you know, both Risa and I run companies and have day jobs. You know, this is not, we didn’t start out to start a whole other career. Our hope is that, there’s a lot of great New York City civic organizations of longstanding, there’s New York City and Company. That if the brand is successful and these partnerships are successful, that one of them will want to pick up the mantle and run the next mile, the rest.
NY Launch Pod: And you talked about how you’re a New York patriot. What’s one tangible thing in Jonathan Rosen’s life that you would like to change in New York?
Jonathan Rosen: I hope out of this. We all realized that the public services we take for granted are really vital, our parks, our subways, our libraries, and that we dedicate ourselves to investing in them like never before. That’s my hope.
NY Launch Pod: Jonathan wants a new park, a new subway
Jonathan Rosen: Not a new one. I think for a lot of New Yorkers, we take, I love Prospect Park. I’ve lived in Brooklyn for 20 years, but you take it for granted. And I don’t know how many people I know who’ve said they’ve never spent more time in the city’s parks system than did it this year as a refuge, as a place to be with the kids. Yeah. And look, I think also my other hopes for the city is I think we’ve all learned a stinger too, about who essential workers are and how we need to value them and respect them. You know, I think we have to really like have a new deal to help support restaurant workers and delivery workers and grocery store workers. They’re really the lifeblood of the city. And I think we have to all think about it as a city, how we can support them.
NY Launch Pod: Jonathan says, don’t take your New York City services for granted. He’s here to support New York. That is a wonderful note to end this on Jonathan, how do people get more involved in the NY Forever campaign?
Jonathan Rosen: Thank you for asking. They can go to NYForever.nyc on the web, they can go to Instagram, which I think is the most fun way to engage with the campaign where we’re doing a lot of our most creative work. And that’s just simply @NYForever, Twitter, same and we hope you will take the pledge, share it with everybody, you know, and get involved.
NY Launch Pod: And buy that merch.
Jonathan Rosen: Buy that merch, I have a feeling we’re going to sell it very quickly.
NY Launch Pod: He says, they’re going to go very quickly. So again, that’s NYForever.nyc, that’s where you’re selling them. Well, Jonathan Rosen, thank you very much for stepping on the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us. And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can visit us at nylaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode, including this one, and follow us on social media @nylaunchpod. And if you are a fan of the New York Launch Pod, Jonathan, and NY Forever are you a fan of the New York Launch Pod?
Jonathan Rosen: Yes!
NY Launch Pod: If you’re a fan like Jonathan, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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