NGOs, Funders, & Filmmakers: Jointly Crafting Tools for Social Action Agendas

Abstract

Funders, mediamakers and nonprofit organisations in the U.S. and internationally have increasingly formed teams to produce highly strategic, often interactive, but still richly storytelling media. Propelling this teamwork has been a combination of new technologies, changing funder strategies in which funders have often taken the initiative in designing projects, and the awareness of nonprofit organisations that media are central to any strategic objective. This paper will discuss several recent cases of such creative partnering, such as: Steps to the Future, a project that created dozens of videos on the subject of HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa, in which Open Society Institute (later Sundance Documentary Fund), southern African activist organizations, and a team of independent media producers worked with the subjects of the videos to craft intimate narratives that speak powerfully across borders. The results are being used throughout sub-Saharan Africa, in a range of screen venues, and will feature interactive, Internet-based elements.



Funders, mediamakers and nonprofit organisations have increasingly formed teams to producehighly strategic, often interactive, but still richly storytelling media. Propelling this teamwork has been:

• a combination of new technologies,
• changing funder strategies in which funders have often taken the initiative in designingprojects, and
• the awareness of nonprofit organisations that media are central to any strategic objective.

This paper will discuss several recent cases of such creative partnering.

This kind of partnering has been hidden under the notion of sponsored films, which have been the unglamorous although often lucrative side of independent and documentary filmmaking. It deserves attention precisely because of the instrumental use of audio-visual media, because partnerships and technological opportunity are breaking down the neat lines between client and professional, and because of the creativity with which partners are approaching shared challenges. Films and videos form an increasingly large body of tools for strategic communications and social action campaigns, They are underused in teaching and are rarely objects of academic scrutiny in research and writing, falling between film studies and public relations. Film studies programs focus on feature filmmaking, with sideline trips into avantgarde/experimental film and into documentary studied as a venerable form with its Great Men(Flaherty, Grierson, Leacock, Wiseman, Burns). Public relations courses regularly feature analysis of modes such as video news releases and websites, but often treat film and video as freestanding texts, as items to be marketed or promoted rather than as instruments and tools. Technology has shifted possibility and created new social practices. VCRs and DVDs are now ubiquitous, and web streaming creates brand new options. Films and videos that are persusasive and provocative, and that are designed to be tools within a wider campaign, will be part of the opinion-shaping process and of information-gathering.

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