Giving Compass' Take:

• Decoding Media Impact: Insights, Advice & Recommendations, a report by Media Impact Funders, helps guide donors to where they can make an impact in pursuing films and social change. 

• How does utilizing film help the public to understand and unpack social change issues? How can more donors get involved in providing capital for social change-related media?

• Learn more about documentary films for social change that help women and girls. 

While many of us watch the Academy Awards to figure out what is worth seeing, this year’s were especially worth noting for people in philanthropy because they demonstrated that film can achieve significant social impact.

The most obvious example was the Oscar-winning “American Factory,” which offers an incisive portrait of the Chinese Fuyao glass factory that rose up in an abandoned General Motors automotive plant near Dayton, Ohio. The film, available on Netflix, shows the complex and confounding dynamics unfolding in our global economy between workers and management, between American employees and their Chinese counterparts, and between human labor and the robots that are inexorably replacing us.

It was the first Oscar for filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, and notably one of the first films to come out of Higher Ground, the new production company founded by former President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.

The film, along with this campaign, opens a window into the ways media and philanthropy can work together to make a difference. We have long harbored hunches about the power of media to influence change, but our understanding about the degree of media’s influence, and the triggers and pathways that lead to change, have often remained somewhat mysterious. That’s why new scholarship is emerging to shed light on the relationship between media and social outcomes.

Media Impact Funders, the organization I lead, has been tracking this growing field of research for seven years and has just published a report to synthesize that learning for grant makers that want to understand where to start. Decoding Media Impact: Insights, Advice & Recommendations is a practical resource that examines four key insights:

There are many ways to measure impact. Among them:

  • Reach: the number of people who read, hear, or watch a media project
  • Influence: adoption of an issue by an influential audience
  • Policy change: a movement toward enacting or altering public policy

Read the full article about films and philanthropy by Nina Sachdev at Media Impact Funders.