The 2017 Media Impact Festival honorees: Where are they now?

You may have heard political commentator Charlie Sykes talk about polarization in this country. He examined it in several newspaper op-eds. He hosted a show about it in President Trump’s first 100 days in office. And he talked about it at our 2017 Media Impact Forum back in June. Read More

Since 2014, Media Impact Funders has been showcasing the work of producers dedicated to creating documentaries in the public interest through our annual Media Impact Festival. This year’s Media Impact Festival is a partnership with the AFI DOCS Film Festival in Washington, D.C., which took place from June 14-18. Our festival celebrates the following 10 media projects, which were selected to participate in AFI’s 2017 Impact Lab. See the case statements below to learn more about their outreach goals and impact. 2017 Selections ACORN and the Firestorm by Reuben Atlas and Sam Pollard (DOCUMENTARY FILM) This film documents the controversies surrounding ACORN, America’s largest grassroots community organizing group,  which became a major player in the 2008 presidential election that resulted in Barack Obama’s victory. Big businesses, Republicans and right­-wing activists took issue with the group, firing accusations of voter fraud and government waste at the left­-leaning organization. The conservative opposition found unexpected allies in a pair of amateur journalists who posed as a pimp and prostitute hoping to expose ACORN via hidden ­camera. The ensuing political drama spawned the now-omnipresent Breitbart Media, and served as a prescient foreshadowing of today’s political climate. Read the case… Read More

Since 2014, Media Impact Funders has been showcasing the work of producers dedicated to creating documentaries in the public interest through our annual Media Impact Festival. This year, we are celebrating the power of interactive technologies to deepen the relationship between news and documentary projects and their audiences. Our 2016 selections — celebrated at our annual Media Impact Forum — span a range of interactive techniques, including virtual reality, participatory reporting, physical installations, and personalized digital experiences. A signature goal for our festival is to illuminate creative engagement strategies invented by producers and outreach teams. We hope to demonstrate fresh ways for funders and makers to connect users and influencers with pressing social issues. Download all five case studies for the projects to learn more about the selected teams’ goals, lessons learned, and outcomes, or find individual case studies below. Throughout the year we will also be hosting face-to-face and online conversations with our festival teams in order to spread knowledge about how such projects can help to fulfill philanthropic goals. Keep an eye on our events section for more details. Congratulations to the teams who produced this year’s projects: Across the Line This immersive virtual reality experience puts the… Read More

Given today's thriving documentary marketplace, competition for audience attention and action is fierce. That’s why we’ve chosen to honor five pioneering film teams for their breakthrough approaches to constructing high-impact social campaigns. Read More

At this year’s Media Impact Forum, we asked two important questions: “What do we want from media innovation in the public interest?” and “How do we get it?” To explore answers, we brought together leading thinkers, funders and media innovators to share their ideas and projects for an inspired digital future. The key theme for the morning was inclusion—from providing tech opportunities for all to ensuring access to knowledge for all. Wendy Hanamura of the Internet Archive served as the emcee, and David Rousseau of the Kaiser Family Foundation as the day’s host, welcoming attendees to the foundation’s Menlo Park headquarters. Watch videos from the day here. What do we want? We started with Van Jones who masterfully grounded our conversation in contrasting stories of hatred and exclusion versus those of love and inclusion. In the agricultural age, he noted, African Americans were property. In the industrial age African Americans were also at the bottom of the economic ladder and the last to be included in industrial revolution. Now with digital age, how will we create one that includes everyone? The good news? It’s only after we have a breakdown that we… Read More

  The 2015 Media Impact Festival celebrated the social impact of media, and its capacity to transform society. In its second year, the festival showcased documentary films that have made a notable impact on a particular issue through powerful coverage and inspired engagement of audiences, influencers, and institutions. Our nominators chose five films to be highlighted, each of which were considered for the The Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film and Digital Media. We assembled case studies examining the outreach campaigns for each of the selections — read them here to learn more about how these high-impact films moved audiences and influencers to action. 2015 Winner of The Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film and Digital Media: Virunga Virunga—which tells the story of conservation workers fighting to protect Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)led to a campaign focused on four key areas: film; legal; advocacy in the DRC; and international advocacy. The campaign garnered public awareness through multiple awards, a large press profile, high-profile supporters, further action by governments and NGOs, and distribution in over 100 countries on a major platform. The filmmakers have successfully engaged six governments… Read More

In the absence of shared tools for assessing engagement, how are documentarians working with researchers and users to understand the impact of their outreach campaigns? The case studies we compiled for our Media Impact Festival provide a few intriguing snapshots. Read More

National Geographic President Gary Knell (above left) welcomed attendees to the June 3 celebration of the Media Impact Festival’s award winners at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC: Read More

  The 2014 Media Impact Festival celebrated the social impact of media, and its capacity to transform society. This yearlong showcase is the next evolution of the Film + Video Festival, which Media Impact Funders presented with the Council on Foundations for many years. To build upon notable work in the emerging field of documentary impact analysis, we partnered with BRITDOC to feature the five finalists selected for their 2013 PUMA Impact Award. The BRITDOC team has distinguished itself through an innovative and rigorous approach to evaluating films as powerful tools for strategic communication. Adapting their methodology, our nominators have chosen five additional films to be highlighted, for a total of 10 selections — each of which was considered for the awards below. We’ve assembled case studies examining the outreach campaigns for each of 2014’s selections — read them here to learn more about how these high-impact films moved audiences and influencers to action. 2014 winners The Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film & Digital Media: Invisible War     The Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film & Digital Media is named in… Read More