The eight edition of FIFDH Impact Days hosted an expert panel that sought to explore innovative models of storytelling collaboration, determine what drives interest from media funders, and investigate how strategic media engagement can elevate campaigns to greater levels of visibility and effectiveness.
Titled ‘Beyond the Headlines: Media as Meaningful Partners for Change,’ organisers posited how journalists and digital media outlets can be powerful allies in amplifying the reach and influence of an impact campaign. But beyond a traditional press strategy around a premiere, what does meaningful collaboration really look like? How can media professionals actively contribute to advancing shared impact goals and shifting public narratives?
Panelists Lindsay Poulton, Editorial Director and Head of Documentaries, The Guardian; Impact strategist Leni Velasco; and Abby Rapoport, Director of Impact Media Funders, sought to answer these questions and more, posed by Impact Days NGO Programme Manager Sophie Mulphin.
Firstly, the panellists gave a little background on their work and their approach to business of Impact.
Filipino Leni Velasco explained how, within an authoritarian populist regime, “our social impact films actually deal with very risky and sensitive issues. We’ve been talking about press freedom, extra judicial killings because of the drug war, censorship, attacks on human rights defenders…and press freedom is under attack.”
“So there is a stronger co-operation actually between civil society and media because of this – both mainstream and alternative media, or community media. Thus, it is really easier for us to really integrate our media plan from the concept, to the promotions, the marketing, to the distribution, especially for social impact films. In fact, some of our films actually tackle the same issues with media papers,” she added.
“So they [media] are our natural allies in our environment. I guess that’s a difference coming from our context and most of the films that we present – we start with the media plan and cooperation. It’s integrated from the whole concept of development to the production, to the distribution of the films…it is an essential strategy, not only to amplify the impact of films, but moreso in terms of risk mitigation, where linking up with the media provides the cover for us to actually minimize the risk, harassments and threats to our protagonists, to our subjects, and also especially to our audience.”
The Guardian’s Lindsay Poulton underlined how she and colleagues “commission, co-produce and collaborate on 12-20 films per year. What we do is [mainly to] come on around early production, but we look at films at every stage. And as I say, we’re really interested to hear from filmmakers and other allies in the independent documentary landscape, what their goals around impact are. I often reflect that if we have 20 films on our slate this year, there’ll be 20 different ideas about what impact means to that film team. So we’re really listening for how we might fit into that, how we might support those goals and participate as allies in that.”
“We’re well-known for our agenda-setting journalism around the world,” she added. “So when audiences come to our platforms, they’re expecting journalism. So as the documentaries team operate inside the Guardian’s journalistic code of practices and principles, so we are expected to be working with that kind of editorial rigour and creative excellence that you expect from The Guardian.”
“What we do as journalists is journalism,” she further underlined. “What we don’t do is campaign, but we acknowledge that the superpower of documentaries is to start conversations and move people and move the dials. We know we participate in that impact, and we acknowledge that…it’s a huge privilege, but with that comes responsibility. We participate in the impact of films, but we’re not always leading on the impact.”
Abby Rapoport, Director of Media Impact Funders commented how her outfit may be US-based, “but our network [of grant makers] includes funders from around the world, and we exist to sort of strengthen media and the public interest through convenings, research, and a collaborative community conversation.”
“Our members include traditional journalism funders, including documentary funders, and they include a lot of subject-specific and narrative-change funders as well,” she added. “And we work across all of those different groups to try to foster conversation, which I think, particularly as we see this trend towards an ecosystem approach, is helpful. Because so many of our members come with one particular expertise, but are finding they need to operate in a broader context in order to have the impact that they want to have, that they want to see.”
Moderator Mulphin asked Leni Velasco how early she starts her Impact/media collaborations.
“We plan it from the beginning of the film, and from the beginning of the whole campaign plan, we involve the media,” she responded. “We work a lot with journalists. That’s why, especially on topics like the drug war, we would tap [into] their materials, but I think [there is] value that we put into it, not just utilizing these materials in the film production itself, but also we give additional value by translating these materials [by giving them] another life…in our campaigns.”
“For example, we would use their photos or videos in websites on drug war-related campaigns, or our campaign for martial law, education…we would transform these videos or photo materials into interactive exhibitions that help us reach more younger audiences. Another value I think is when these creative products or films made by the journalists or media themselves are distributed, it translates into another life-form in terms of it not just ending up on the media platform, but we bring it and distribute it to the communities and schools nationwide.”
“So it creates more sustained engagement, and it doesn’t end when they publish it in the usual cinemas or on the usual TV or film platforms, but bringing it to civil society as a distribution point actually gives it another life-form that makes more sustained, meaningful engagement for larger and broader communities.”
The Guardian’s Poulton underlined the “code of conduct” required of producers/filmmakers whose films screen on the platform. “We’re expect for our films to be fact-based storytelling and to be made with the editorial rigour that all of our journalism is – our audiences expect that, my bosses expect that. So acknowledging audiences with a documentary on our platform, they are coming to that film experiencing it alongside journalism, they’re expecting a certain sort of fact-based storytelling. So that’s really important. And the earlier that we are on, and alongside, those [production and editorial] decisions that are being made, the easier it is for us to assess that, to fact-check that, to be on that journey.”
And how does her decision-making on docs align with the increasing speed of the news cycle, Mulphin asked. “Yeah, it’s a really good question and it’s a tension that we experience all the time, because of course working in a news organization that has, for 200 years, had a daily rhythm of putting out a product that is the newspaper, that is a very different culture to the culture of long-form independent documentary storytelling. So our films take between, I would say six to 18 months, roughly. Some have been quicker and some have been very much longer, but that’s sort of roughly an indication of timelines of filmmaking. So we’re very much the slow lane in the newspaper. We are, I think, to the newspaper, what long-reads are to reporting.”
Impact Media Funders’ Rapoport was asked if there are there specific funders for different parts of the Impact ecosystem, or are funders looking more at Impact from a macro perspective?
“There’s a report called Beyond Impact that Perspective Fund (US) put out at the end of 2024…and I think that was a really helpful marker of just how much appreciation I think there now is for the need to think about the story and the different formats that that story needs to exist within,” she answered.
“So I don’t know that we’re seeing funders who are specifically funding the short form or funding like a specific style within the film, but I do think that there’s a growing awareness that to have the Impact you want to have, you need to fund the filmmakers, not just in one single product, but in terms of other pieces that can take on legs. And I think that report is really helpful because it makes this point that really stayed with me, that you use the right platforms and the right storytelling strategies to reach the right people.”
“So finding the shortcut that is most impactful may look different than how it would look in a two-hour film, but will reach folks in different ways,” she clarified. “So I think that’s a growing awareness. I don’t know that that would have been true a few years back, but I think funders do appreciate that now. And I think they see that the need for those tools is to any sort of impact campaign that they might want to fund. And I’ll just shout out since ‘narrative oceans’ may be a new term for folks [outside] the Pop Culture Collab in the US, but it has really done a lot to bring awareness to this idea of funder awareness of ecosystems and not just staying in one’s particular lane.”
Velasco concurred: “I just want to jump from what Abby shared in terms of the ‘narrative ocean.’ I think that’s where we need to also look at the lens of social impact, that it’s not just storytelling. It’s not just communicating our messages. We have to look at it through a broader lens and that’s what makes it not only sexier funder-wise, but also in terms of the more meaningful, strategic impact.”
“Because coming from my world, people are very scared of social impact. Filmmakers are very scared. It feels that what we usually get is that it’s their role as filmmakers to make all of this happen, as if their film is going to change the world – and we always assure them that it takes a village to do this social impact. I think that’s where the narrative ocean comes in.”
She added later in the debate: “I think we need to also pop our own bubble in terms of the social impact space, that it’s not enough that we just tell good stories. I think we need to build a narrative infrastructure that allows us to actually make the soil for our storytelling so that it’s not just us as creatives or filmmakers doing the stories, but I think we need to also empower the narrators that we work with.”
“We’re not the only narrators of our stories in social impact films,” she continued. “It’s both us, the creatives working on the film and the grassroots communities who are presenting their issues. And then we also have to develop our better narration of this story, so that it can make the meaningful impact that we’re all aspiring to, whether this means dismantling a very harmful narrative or changing the narrative. And I think that’s what we need to invest in – the whole narrative infrastructure to make our storytelling more powerful.”
