Storytelling and Social Change
[Source:Socialedge.org]
Hosted by Paula Goldman (March 2008)
Recent years have seen a number of effective projects using storytelling and marketing techniques to turn the needle on important social issues. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Population Media has been using radio soap operas to successfully encourage behavioral change on reproductive health issues. In India, Breakthrough has created popular music videos to raise the profile of gender-based human rights issues with a mass audience. Most recognizably, the film “An Inconvenient Truth” helped mainstream the issue of climate change.
While much of the social entrepreneurship sector focuses on service delivery and market-based approaches, there is also an important role for projects which exist solely to raise the profile of specific social problems. The use of compelling narratives and creative media allows larger audiences to understand and connect with issues; this in turn creates growing demand for market-based approaches to the same problems. There is a huge market for fair-trade products in the UK now, for example, because of decades of public education efforts on the subject– from films to community gatherings.
Such efforts, however, are also fraught with questions and problems. They tend to be less attractive to funders (and therefore less sustainable) because it is much harder for them to understand and quantify their impact… and because it often takes decades, and multiple public education campaigns, to achieve mainstream recognition on any given issue.
Here are questions for discussion:
1) How much profit potential is there really for these public education projects? Should their goal (increased awareness of social issues) be considered a social good, and therefore rely primarily on philanthropic and public funding? How much room is there for hybrid models which combine philanthropic and for-profit strategies?
2) What are best practices to predict and measure impact? A film like An Inconvenient Truth worked brilliantly in part because it came on the back of decades of grassroots public education about the environment. Can we model the quantity and structure of awareness-raising that is needed to finally create a tipping point in public acceptance on a given issue? How would this model differ from issue to issue and from country to country?
3) What are other effective examples? Can you think of a creative/media project on a social issue that changed your life? Conversely, can you think of creative public education projects that didn’t work—and guess at why?
Join Paula Goldman in the conversation that follows on the blog.
