Each year, businesses in Utah are forced to pay a tax on business supplies, called the Tangible Personal Property Tax (TPPT). The tax requires business owners to tally up their supplies and use a number of confusing depreciation schedules to determine how much they owe. It’s an example of double-taxation: Businesses already pay sales taxes when they purchase these business supplies. Worse, it requires the taxpayer to do quite a bit of work just to determine how much they owe.

Kent Forbush, for example, lives in southern Utah and has a small leather-working business creating wallets, gun holsters, and belts. Kent was notified by his county that he needed to pay TPPT. Unsure of what this meant, Kent went to the county assessor’s office to learn more. He was met with dozens of questions about the value of his sewing machine, computer, and hand tools. He was told that he must keep a record of the value of all equipment he used, including his needles and thread. On top of that, the county told Kent he needed to become knowledgeable about the different depreciation schedules and associated property categories.

To free Utah business owners like Kent from this burdensome tax, the Libertas Institute went to work. The Institute published a policy brief that explains what the tax is and how it hurts both big and small businesses in the state. In addition to promoting and sharing the policy brief, Libertas came up with an innovative, creative way to explain the tax’s damage to Utah residents and policymakers: a video parody of the hit TV show “The Office.”

SPN: Tell us about the project.

Libertas: Nichelle (our director of communications) was a one-man band and managed two cameras, sound, framing, lighting, and the “talent” (our employees), all while participating in the video herself as an actor. This project was a parody video where Libertas employees acted as “The Office” employees who struggled to comply with an unfair, annual business tax. The video raised awareness about the issue among legislators, lobbyists, and activists, helping us successfully pursue legislative reform this session and ease the burden of this tax on business owners.

SPN: Who was your target audience?

Libertas: Our primary audience was legislators, and we used microtargeting on Facebook to place the video in their Facebook and Instagram streams. Our secondary audience was politically elite folks—legislators, activists, delegates, etc.—who shared the video and created chatter online about the need to eliminate this tax.

SPN: What made this project effective? Were there certain people or tools that made the project work?

Libertas: A video like this would typically involve a sound crew and microphones to catch ambient audio, rather than having everybody wear a microphone, since multiple people were speaking. We didn’t have that luxury, so we shot each scene from multiple angles, changing mics between shots so each person could simply use our two lavalier microphones. A video of this nature would also have two or more camera operators. We had one, Nichelle, who managed one camera on a tripod while holding another one for a secondary shot. She also edited the entire video herself. The end result is a fun video that looks like many people were involved in its production and editing, when it was all just one person.

SPN: What lessons did you learn?

Libertas: We learned that this type of content is well received by our audience—we had dozens of legislators and lobbyists come up to us during the session to say how much they enjoyed it and that they didn’t realize the tangible tax was as invasive as it was. Our key problem was simply figuring out how to extend Nichelle into multiple roles, which was a stretch for her. But the video was so successful that we plan to do another one like it, except hopefully this time we can find another pair of hands to help her!

SPN: What was your budget?

Libertas: We had no budget to shoot this video, apart from Nichelle’s salary. Factoring in her time spent on this, we estimate it cost around $4,000.

SPN: How did you measure the impact of the video? What were the results?

Libertas: We measured the impact primarily by whether we were able to advance reforms during the legislative session. While the effort to get rid of this tax stalled this year due to a broader discussion on tax reform, a bill passed that included several incremental reforms to TPPT. It provides some tax relief to all kinds of businesses that are burdened by these onerous audits and reports, including home-based businesses, mom-and-pop shops, start-ups in their infancy, and short-term rentals.

For their innovative campaign to remove a burdensome tax on Utah businesses, the Libertas Institute is a 2020 SPN Communications Excellence Awards Finalist for the Creative Shoestring Budget Award.