Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
Designing Tomorrow explores a new playbook for modern social impact leaders and brands to reach their true impact potential.
Why do some social impact brands thrive, while so many others fail to get traction, build support for their cause, and make meaningful progress? Imagine your impact with truly sustainable revenue and resources. With deeper community engagement and relationships. With more influence in your social impact category.
Hosted by Eric Ressler, Founder & Creative Director of Cosmic, with co-host Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, each episode dives into the strategies, mindsets, and behaviors top social impact brands use to play and win in the attention economy. Go beyond high-level concepts to specific tools and tactics you can use today.
Watch on YouTube or listen to new episodes each Tuesday.
Let’s design a better tomorrow, together.
Designing Tomorrow is a Cosmic Production. Learn more at https://designbycosmic.com/
Designing Tomorrow is a registered trademark of Design By Cosmic, Inc.
Episodes
91 episodes
Feelings Don't Drive Change
Most social impact campaigns are built on two ingredients: information and emotion. The data makes the case. The storytelling makes people care. But caring, on its own, has a shelf life. Saralynn Finn, founder of Sett & Sley Consulting, joi...
Say What You Actually Believe
Most social impact leaders got into this work because they care deeply about the mission, not because they wanted to be public figures with opinions. But that instinct to stay quiet and let the work speak for itself may be doing more harm than ...
Integrity Alone Will Get You Outplayed
There's an unspoken rule in the social impact sector: we tell the truth, we follow the science, we play fair. But those rules are increasingly a losing strategy, because the industries we're up against don't have to win the argument. They just ...
Brandmaxxing or Debranding: Pick Your Side
There's a trend called looksmaxxing that says appearance is everything, and optimizing it is just pragmatism. Apply that same logic to nonprofits and you get an interesting thought experiment: what happens when an organization goes all in on br...
Trust No One Is Exactly What Authoritarians Want
Every major technological paradigm shift has broken society before it fixed it. The printing press, radio, television. Each one reshaped how we communicate and what we believe. Now the internet, social media, and AI are repeating the pattern at...
Visibility Beats Impact
There's a quiet belief running through the social impact space that being too visible somehow cheapens the work. That good organizations should let their impact speak for itself. But the orgs that get the funding, the talent, and the momentum a...
Who Actually Gets a Seat at the Table?
The social impact sector has made community co-creation almost sacred. Design with people, not for them. Give everyone a voice. But what happens when the loudest voices aren't the most informed, and the planning process stalls because nobody ca...
Most of Your Brand Strategy is a Waste of Time
Most nonprofit leaders have been through some version of the brand strategy process. Eric calls it process theater: brand strategy work that sounds great in proposals but leaves everyone wondering what they're actually building toward. This epi...
AI Doesn't Know What Empathy Looks Like
Technology promised to close the digital divide, but too often the people building it don't reflect the communities affected by it. Tina-Marie Gulley, former CEO of Ada Developers Academy, sits down with Eric to talk about what it takes to buil...
Funders Don't Owe You Anything
There's a post going around LinkedIn right now where a fundraiser is calling out a foundation for not structuring a grant as multi-year support. The tone is essentially: our work matters, so funders should give us what we need.That spar...
Inside charity:water's Big Brand Bet
The nonprofit sector has a marketing philosophy problem. We adopted a playbook built almost entirely around conversion: get the click, get the gift, optimize the funnel. But all of that activation depends on something most organizations never i...
Who Are You Becoming?
A single phrase from a previous episode sent Eric into an existential tailspin, and reshaped how he thinks about organizational identity. In this episode, Eric and Jonathan unpack why "Who are we becoming?" hits harder than any strategic planni...
Storytelling Needs an Ecosystem
The social impact sector has gotten very good at describing problems: white papers, statistics, annual reports filled with data on gaps and needs. But it hasn't built a system for telling stories that actually move people. Heather Mason spent 2...
WTF Even is Strategy?
Everyone claims to be strategic. But what does that word even mean anymore?In this episode, Eric and Jonathan dig into a question that comes up constantly: what actually separates strategy from tactics, and why do so many strategic plans...
Philanthropy Can Afford to Give More
There's $1.5 trillion sitting in American foundations right now. Add in donor-advised funds and the total climbs past $1.7 trillion. Most of it isn't moving. Meanwhile, the organizations on the front lines of housing, health, democracy, and cli...
The Great Content Reset
AI slop is flooding every channel. Here's what changes, what doesn't, and how to cut through the noise.In this episode, Eric and Jonathan dig into the great content reset — the collision of AI, shifting media formats, and a growing hunge...
Who Should Fund The People?
If solving the world's hardest problems requires the world's best people, why do we pay social impact professionals like they should be grateful just to have a job? The sector still treats its workforce as a cost to be minimized rather than the...
The Cost of "Someday"
Every organization has a “someday” list.The rebrand that never quite gets prioritized. The content strategy that’s been “in the works” for three years. The bold idea that came up in a board meeting, got tabled for further discussion — an...
Making Your Movement Irresistible
In the social impact sector, we talk a lot about systems. Structural barriers. Root causes. Power structures. But I've watched systems-focused thinking become its own kind of trap: top-down, abstract, and alienating the very people it aims to s...
Jonathan's Back?! Wins, Struggles, and What We Learned in 2025
After months away, Jonathan Hicken returns to Designing Tomorrow — and this time, we're recording from the brand new Seymour Studios at the Seymour Center in Santa Cruz.In this episode, Eric and Jonathan take a real look back at 2025: a...
Design Your Board (Or It Will Design Itself)
What if the biggest barrier to your mission isn't funding, or talent, or market conditions — but the people sitting in your boardroom?Not because they're bad people. But because they don't have clear expectations about their role. They w...
What Happens When Organizations Can't Dream
What happens when organizations can't dream?Not because they lack vision. But because they're too busy scrambling to make payroll, chasing emergency grants, firefighting the latest crisis. Scarcity doesn't just drain bank accounts — it s...
Fewer Donors, Bigger Checks. Interpreting the Latest Giving Data.
We break down the 2025 Bank of America Study of Philanthropy with the researchers who created it — exploring what this concentration means for nonprofit sustainability and the future of philanthropy. There’s a number that keeps show...