Ngos, Funders, And Filmmakers: Jointly Crafting Tools For Social Action Agendas

Ngos, Funders, And Filmmakers: Jointly Crafting Tools For Social Action Agendas

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Funders, mediamakers and nonprofit organizations 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 organizations 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

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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
avant garde/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...