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What You’ll Learn
Sometimes the best storytellers aren’t on your communications team–they’re at your kitchen table. In this episode, White River Valley Electric Cooperative’s Jaime Dopp shares how a simple video series featuring lineworkers’ children captured hearts, racked up thousands of views and reminded members why this work matters.
Guest Speaker
Jamie Dopp
Show Notes
Transcripts are lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Intro: StoryConnect, a Pioneer podcast, helps you discover ideas to shape your stories and connect with your community. Love this episode? Follow StoryConnect on your favorite podcast platform and YouTube so you don’t miss your next great idea.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Sometimes the best storytellers aren’t on your communications team. They’re at your kitchen table. At White River Valley Electric Cooperative, a social media video series featuring lineworkers’ children, captured hearts, racked up thousands of views, and helped connect members on a deeper level to utility staff. Plus, they were just so darn cute to watch. That’s what we’re going to be talking about on this episode of The StoryConnect Podcast. Hi, I’m your host, Megan McKoy-Noe, one of the storytellers at Pioneer Utility Resources, and I am joined by Jamie Dopp, manager of marketing and communications at White River Valley Electric Cooperative in lovely Branson, Missouri. Jamie, thank you so much for joining me today. But you know what? It might sound like it’s just a conversation between the two of us, but we’re not alone.
Jamie Dopp: Uh oh.
Megan McKoy-Noe: I know. We’re talking in front of a fabulous live audience at StoryConnect 2026 in Tacoma, Washington. Our co-op friends at Meridian Cooperative sponsored this storytelling moment. Thanks, Meridian, for supporting utility storytellers again this year, and it’s a really special year for us. We’re celebrating ten years on The StoryConnect Podcast, and so we are here with our friends at StoryConnect. Let’s give a round of applause for all the ideas that have been shared on StoryConnect. Yes. All right, let’s dive into your story, Jamie.
Jamie Dopp: Let’s do it.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Let’s do it. All right. Last April, your team shared a story, a series of videos, featuring kids of lineworkers, and they took off. Some had more than 10,000 views, which was amazing. And I believe all of them had more than 1,000 views.
Jamie Dopp: They did.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Which is just incredible engagement that you had. Where did the idea come from to feature children in these videos? And I know what everyone’s thinking, was it hard to get permission from the staff?
Jamie Dopp: It was super easy to get permission. People like showing off their children.
Megan McKoy-Noe: No. I have never heard that before.
Jamie Dopp: They do. And grandmas like seeing them online.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Yep, yep. 10,000 grandmas out there. That’ll do it.
Jamie Dopp: The idea came from looking for a new way to celebrate our lineworkers on Lineworker Appreciation Day. So we created this series. The lineworkers’ wives are a very tight knit group.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Oh, and if you have them on your side.
Jamie Dopp: Then you can.
Megan McKoy-Noe: You can do anything.
Jamie Dopp: Accomplish anything.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Yes, yes. I love that. All right. So did you get them excited about it?
Jamie Dopp: That’s where it all started. One of my, I have the sweetest team in the co-op world. And one of them came up with this idea, and she reached out to the lineworkers wives and said, we’d like to show this video on Lineworker Appreciation Day of your kids talking about how much they appreciate their dads.
Megan McKoy-Noe: I mean, you’ve got that for April and all of us are going, oh. Y’all, you haven’t even seen the videos. Let me tell you. The questions that they were asking were really simple, but powerful. Like, what’s your dad’s favorite part of work? What would happen if no one did their job? How did you pick what you were going to ask the kids?
Jamie Dopp: We tried to keep it simple, like you were saying, because we had kids from one year old to about 10-11 years old. So we needed to be able where they could all answer the best of their abilities.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, some of them couldn’t quite answer, and that’s what made it adorable.
Jamie Dopp: That’s what, one of them just kept saying, “Daddy.”
Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, in the very first video that you posted was “Where does your dad work?” Right? And just hearing them try to explain where he worked was really fun too and the way that they said the name of your utility. And that whole video was just the kids trying to say the name of your utility, which is a great way to get your brand ingrained in the community.
Jamie Dopp: Yes. Because during the intro, you may have noticed we have one of the longest names for a cooperative. And so the kids would say White River with a lot of enthusiasm.
Megan McKoy-Noe: White River!
Jamie Dopp: White River!
Megan McKoy-Noe: Keep going. Valley! Electric! And then co-op. Yeah, it was very cute. When you asked where the kids’ dads worked, it really resonated. And that’s the one that got 10,000 views. Just where does your dad work? Why do you think the way that the kids answered those simple questions, why did it connect so well with your audience? Because it wasn’t all grandmas / grandpas.
Jamie Dopp: There were some cousins too. (laughs) Just kidding. No, it resonated because of the innocence of kids, and they’re just so sweet. Our theme for 2025 was The People Behind Your Power, And we spent so much time focusing on our employees. But really a strong part of the people behind the power are the homes that are supporting the people that work at the utility.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Oh, I love that. It’s the entire family that’s on the line, not just the lineworkers during the day. So bringing them and showing that full picture, and then it’s just, just makes your little heartbeat, just watching these kids. Now, I think a lot of us know it would be really fun to do something like this, but featuring children takes some special considerations. There’s privacy concerns. I mean, you might want to get some sign-off from the folks. I know you said the lineworkers wives, partners were excited about this and helped you out, but how did you take into account keeping, like making sure you had permissions? Did you get written permission down to share for getting a video series like this together?
Jamie Dopp: So we asked the mothers to provide the videos, and they provided it. So we took that as their permission to use their child’s videos. We did not put their names or who their dad was, so there was no identifying the child that way.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah. Okay, great. How many videos did y’all produce? Because it wasn’t just one. And I don’t think I even could count. Because you had them all branded a very specific way. They were all green with white. I think it was a white outline, and then the same font, which I’m a font freak. So I get excited when I see a very intentional approach to design and branding a video series like that. So how many did y’all make?
Jamie Dopp: We ended up making nine in the whole series. Had over 22,000 views by the time we were finished.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Okay. And this was just for Lineworker Appreciation, but I’m sure you could reshare them for. And, I’m sure you probably did, for Father’s Day and other events throughout the year too.
Jamie Dopp: Yeah, we kept the series going, so we put the videos together as a long form and showed it to the lineworkers on Lineworker Appreciation Day. We do a lunch for them, and so we kicked it off by showing them that they did not know their kids had done it. So it was a special surprise. And then we broke it by each question. So we released the videos weekly or every other week and just kept continuing showing them.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Oh, I love that so much. From a production standpoint, what did it look like? Was it simple? I mean, you said that you had the lineworkers wives get the videos to you. Did you let them know, hey, these are going to be for reels, so make sure the orientation is right. Did you give them a Dropbox link for sending it to you, or did they just try all texting your team?
Jamie Dopp: It was texting my team. We did give them specific videos or instructions. Try to go to a quiet place or shoot vertically.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Okay.
Jamie Dopp: And they all followed the instructions well. Then we didn’t have to mess with any of it.
Megan McKoy-Noe: I love it when –
Jamie Dopp: There were some that were noisier, but it was such a great video series, and it showed that you really don’t have to have great equipment to pull something great off.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Did you do anything special for the lineworkers’ wives afterwards, or did they get the full video?
Jamie Dopp: We sent them the full videos after.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah. And how many lineworkers do you all have?
Jamie Dopp: We have five service locations and have about ten lineworkers per, so about 50?
Megan McKoy-Noe: Okay. Okay. So that’s a big group to coordinate. Do you know roughly how many wives helped and partners helped support the effort?
Jamie Dopp: We had probably about ten, which was a great mix and a variety of ages.
Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that, and I’m hoping folks are getting excited about this idea. I know it’s a team, and you were stressing to me before we got into the podcast. You’re like, I work with an amazing team. It’s not just me. But what was your favorite part of working on the project? What moment really stuck with you?
Jamie Dopp: So I helped close caption it because there were some kids that were really hard to understand. So trying to figure out what they were saying. One of them said, when we asked, what does your daddy do? She said, pole dancing. And I’m like, did she?
Megan McKoy-Noe: No!
Jamie Dopp: Did she really just say pole dancing? Yes, she did.
Megan McKoy-Noe: I mean. I’m going down a whole other rabbit hole with that one, Jamie.
Jamie Dopp: I wonder what kind of conversations happened in their home.
Megan McKoy-Noe: So that pole dancing stuck with you? I like that. But I love that you had to translate. Did you leave it that way in the captions?
Jamie Dopp: Oh, yes.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Of course you did! Okay.
Jamie Dopp: It was sweet.
Megan McKoy-Noe: And you wonder why they got 10,000 views? Are you going to follow up with the actual dads with their kids at some point?
Jamie Dopp: We had a therapy session with the dad. No, about the pole dancing? Just kidding.
Megan McKoy-Noe: Oh, I love that. Now you have a really robust social media presence, and I followed y’all for many, many years. Not in a creepy way. I just like to peek over and see what are they doing. But this performed, I would say better than most of the content that you have had so far. Why do you think they performed so well compared to the normal, the typical utility content that you put out there? What made them stand out?
Jamie Dopp: Well, I think it’s hard to resist a cute kid. Kids and puppies, right? Like, but also I think they help tell a story that when the lineworkers are out restoring power, there’s someone at home backing them up. One of the kids had mentioned that the hardest part of their dad’s job is when they’re not there. And so that kind of drove home that when they’re restoring powers for our members, it’s something more to them than that.
Megan McKoy-Noe: There’s so much more behind the people that you see working on the side of the road. So I love that y’all were able to capture that, have that clear emotional connection. Did you learn anything from this? Because I’ve seen you do, you’re doing some other really fun things. And I didn’t even get to dive into all of them. I think it’s the Google search?
Jamie Dopp: Oh yea, we did a fun, we did a play on the Google search asking questions of our Youth Tours’ winners, the top questions to ask.
Megan McKoy-Noe: What, and I’m sorry for not prepping you for this, Jamie, but do y’all want me to ask her about this? Yes? Okay. So this is going on right now. Youth Tour. And I saw they’re holding up Google, and it has, what are they searching for?
Jamie Dopp: The top questions we thought they would ask.
Megan McKoy-Noe: About Youth Tour?
Jamie Dopp: Yes, about Youth Tour, and we had one of last year’s participants come in, pull the strip off, read it and answer about his experience on Youth Tour. And that was to try to garner more participants this year.
Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that. So I love that you’re featuring more local faces, whether they’re kids or they’re Youth Tour participants, to answer questions. And I think ultimately it builds those connections right with your community, which is so important. Is it hard to do that?
Jamie Dopp: A lot of people hide from us when they see our tiny mic around. We’ve been doing it with our fiber team because we don’t have the cheapest packages or prices, but we are local.
Megan McKoy-Noe: You’re the best.
Jamie Dopp: We are the best. We’re fiber. And so we’ve been doing a lot of reels with them. The People Behind Your Fiber, Your Internet, and just doing little videos about what’s your favorite place to eat here? Where do you like to get coffee? And just localize ourselves.
Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that, and I think that’s something any of us can do, as long as we can catch them when they try to run away from us. So one last question before I let you go, because we could talk, and I could talk all day about this stuff. I love it when folks are doing really fun things to connect with their communities and their staff, showcase and humanize their staff. But for folks that are listening, this might feel a little bit intimidating to try. Especially maybe if you’re a one person shop and a lot of us are. What advice would you give to someone who wants to create a video series like this?
Jamie Dopp: Don’t put pressure on yourself. It’s really a lot easier than you think. Just give it a try and people will watch.
Megan McKoy-Noe: People will watch. I love that. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with utility pioneers. And thank you to our amazing StoryConnect audience. She is Jamie Dopp with White River Valley Electric Cooperative in Missouri. And I’m your host, Megan McKoy-Noe. Until we talk again, keep telling your story.
Outro: StoryConnect is a production of Pioneer Utility Resources. Send questions to mailto:hello@pioneer.com and learn more about our member-owned marketing agency at Pioneer.coop.