Our database of impact tools includes frameworks, apps, and case studies of high-impact media projects to help you think through your impact assessment strategy.

Creative Coalitions: A Handbook for Change is a handbook that promotes collective action as a means to secure systemic changes to pressing social issues. The toolkit provides real world examples of how these methods have produced lasting change.

Commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, this report explores answers to critical questions in five key areas—strategy, capacity, content, platforms, and evaluation—and provides a framework to help organizations and foundations create and evaluate the impact of storytelling initiatives designed to promote social change. The report also provides suggestions for toolkits, resources, and next steps for developing a “Storytelling Community” for the social impact sector.

DOC SOCIETY’s Impact Awards honor “the documentary films that have made the greatest impact on society.” Media makers can dig into case studies on the campaigns for winners to help inform their own impact campaigns.

Documentary Simple Collaboration Applied for Learning and Evaluation (DocSCALE) is mobile platform, developed by ITVS, that allows for for rapid, participatory impact assessment for documentary films. Inspired by the DevCAFE system developed at CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at University of California, Berkeley, DocScale uses a voice response survey that allows for efficient filtering of changes in people’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Learn more about the DocScale prototype and how it was used to evaluate Women and Girls Lead Global, a documentary-focused initiative in India, in this whitepaper.

The Feedback Commons is a tool for listening and responding to community members while gaining insight from other organizations doing similar work. You can create your own simple feedback system with their four easy steps—“design, collect, analyze, collaborate.”

The Knight Foundation provides a curated list of assessment resources to help nonprofit organizations with evaluation and social impact measurement.

How can funders work together to design strategy and assess progress? This interactive site from GrantCraft points the way to useful tools.

This guide from the Citizen Engagement Lab is designed to help advocates and nonprofit organizations collaborate with documentary filmmakers to advance their causes. It includes case studies, key strategies and tactics, and a companion FAQ to help advocates think through their own unique impact goals and methods.

Developed by A Fourth Act, an “interdisciplinary collective of storytellers, facilitators, researchers, designers and technologists,” Harvis is a mobile web application that allows facilitators of screenings and panel discussions to “immediately and effectively surface the issues most important to the community and mine hidden stories.” Audience members use their mobile devices to express their responses to issues presented in a given screening or discussion. At the end of the presentation, an interactive visualization of the aggregated responses can be used to facilitate conversation or measure impact.

Active Voice’s Horticulture framework uses garden tools as metaphors so mediamakers can think strategically about effective storytelling. Is your story-driven media project more of a sledgehammer or a trellis? Find out here.

While not specifically designed for assessing the impact of media projects, the Impact Assessment app can help makers evaluate, promote and communicate by capturing outcomes on the fly. It also allows uses to record video, photo and audio stories and turn those stories into data.

This toolkit provides insights from VR Action Lab, a collaboration between Harmony Labs, Google’s Daydream Impact, Screenwriters Colony, Sensorium Works and others that embedded virtual reality in curricula designed to teach middle schoolers anti-bullying behaviors. The toolkit offers guidance, questions for reflection, and lessons learned for other media makers and organizations seeking to use virtual reality to achieve social impact.