Welcome to Storytelling For Impact
It’s 2022, another Earth Day, and reports of climate disaster are raining down everywhere, swallowing us up in a polluted sea of climate anxiety. Yet when we come together to find our purpose and align our actions, we can make real change happen. Telling and sharing our stories is what connects, inspires and empowers us. Understanding how storytelling can be a catalyst for positive solutions and can have significant, long-lasting impact is what this blog is all about.
Are your films, videos, digital media making any difference?
Since 2020, our research team has considered a holistic approach to impact, developing strategies informed by the literature and case studies designed to help your films reach their full impact potential. We are sharing our research to stimulate discussion and build a greater understanding of how we can engage and mobilize audiences in these turbulent times.
We start with a Visionary Change Model: What is your goal? Who can help achieve it? How do you reach that audience? Our framework is non-linear, inherently participatory, and incorporates ongoing feedback loops. It goes beyond Theory of Change frameworks to encourage aspirational change, the kind of change that systemically alters our assumptions. We want filmmakers, participants, funders, and distributors to consider impact from the onset of the creative journey.
We use an Impact Spiral Framework, outlined in the Center For Environmental Filmmaking’s Impact Media Research report, that illustrates how creative design, collaborative production models, and outreach strategies can work together to achieve meaningful and long-lasting impact.
Creative Design
- We explore how to employ aesthetics, tone, and the power of emotional connection to engage viewers. We look at representation and how it can foster empathy, which is critical to bringing people together around issues.
Collaborative Models
- We examine new alliances centered on lasting, transformational change, such as through participatory and collaborative models of filmmaking involving local experts and communities.
Outreach Strategies
- We navigate how to engage and motivate audiences in today’s complex media landscape from the outset of development. We delve into a range of techniques and campaigns, from global to hyper-targeted, with a look at impact assessment and measurement tools.
STORYTELLING FOR IMPACT
Activating people to change attitudes and behavior begins with the ability to answer this simple question: “Why should I care?” Our research focuses on 21st century approaches to creating engagement and activating audiences, and dives deep into the power of awe and empathy.
“Our world needs the stories of truth-tellers, of resilience and community power, and of remarkable innovation.”¹
— Crystal Hayling, Executive Director, The Libra Foundation
We have unprecedented opportunities to engage audiences in the critical challenges facing our planet, from climate crises, pandemics, species extinction, environmental injustice and racism, and much more. Today’s evolving, complex global media landscape provides ways to create visionary impact with precision. It has the potential to expand diversity, equity and inclusion and ensure broad-based representation of more perspectives. Defining and designing impact is quickly evolving far beyond good ratings and “likes.” We want our readers to come away with a deeper understanding of how nature, environmental and science media can change hearts and minds and be a powerful means for cultural, societal and policy transformation.
“Indeed, if only one lesson prevails from the COVID-19 fallout, it should be that our future is entirely linked to our behaviors, and radically changing our behaviors can have a rapid and dramatically positive impact on our natural world.”²
What can you expect from our “Storytelling For Impact” blog?
- Exploration into creative, collaborative and outreach impact strategies
- Understanding how emotional tone and impact work hand in hand
- Examining how empathy influences us as viewers
- Advancing equitable filmmaking and inclusive voices
- Tracking how we can measure impact and what tools are available
- Ongoing Case Studies that reflect a Visionary Change Framework
We invite your feedback and comments. If you are interested in contributing or co-writing a blog and/or suggesting a film for a Case Study, please contact me at maggiestogner@me.com, Center For Environmental Filmmaking. For more about our research: www.cefimpactmedia.org
Many thanks to HHMI/Tangled Bank Studios for supporting our efforts.
Written by: Maggie Burnette Stogner, Nicole Wackerly, and Carlos Macher
[1] Armour-Jones, S. (2020). Environmental media grantmaking: how funders are tipping the scales toward change. Impact Media Funders, p. 13.
[2] Armour-Jones, S. (2020). Environmental media grantmaking: how funders are tipping the scales toward change. Impact Media Funders, p. 2.
