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
108 episodes
What to Take and Leave From Design Thinking and the Scientific Method
Social impact teams are happy to experiment. Where they struggle is admitting when the experiment fails. Jonathan and I dig into what design thinking and the scientific method can teach the sector, and why our refusal to name failure may be the...
Learning Isn't What's Slowing Philanthropy Down
Philanthropy takes heat for being slow to move money, and learning usually gets the blame. Katherine Haugh, founder of the Convive Collective and a learning partner to some of the largest climate-focused philanthropies in the US and...
Your Difference Is the Superpower
Sandy Gould has spent 36 years studying where people's "superpowers" come from, and his answer is simple: the thing that makes you different is the same thing that lets you create what no one else can. In this conversation with Eric Ressler, th...
Run Your Nonprofit Like a Scientist
Every leader in the social impact space has failures. But we rarely talk about them. We brush over them, reframe them, paper over them. Michelle Moog-Koussa thinks that's a mistake. She built the Bob Moog Foundation from $15,000 and a stack of ...
If Only They Got Us, They'd Fund Us
Every nonprofit leader has told themselves the same story: if funders just understood us, they'd fund us. Eric and Jonathan make the uncomfortable case that misunderstood impact is usually a you problem, and that what looks like a storytelling ...
Don't Coast on Your Momentum
Most leaders know how to fight through a crisis. Almost nobody's ready for the moment things start working.That's where Jonathan finds himself. Five years into running the Seymour Center, the survival years behind him. Funding's solid. T...
You Design Your Culture. Here's How
Is culture something you design, or does it emerge from the people you hire? I think you design it, through the decisions you make every day. Jonathan thinks it starts with the people and grows from there. The more we talked, the more the two c...
Decisions Are Being Made For Us, Not With Us
Two camps are forming around AI in the social impact space. One says boycott it. The other says you're already behind. Meanwhile, the biggest decisions are being made without us. Kaz McGrath and Stephen Silveira of Play (PLAI — Purp...
How to Avoid the Executive Bottleneck Trap
I have this problem, and I have it bad. At Cosmic I'm the bottleneck on more things than I should be, holding onto work because explaining it feels slower than just doing it. Jonathan doesn't get stuck there as often, so we dug into how executi...
Get Seen, Get Supported
Nonprofit leaders want more people to see their work, but almost none of them want to be the one posting about it. Saralynn Finn and I dig into what changes once you get past that resistance: story stems, a repeatable format for tur...
Claiming Your Role in the Social Impact Ecosystem
Every social impact leader believes in their mission.Funders assume that too. What they actually want to know is why you, specifically, over the ten other orgs working the same issue, or the bigger name with more reach and a longer track...
What Would Have to Be True?
Sarah Newkirk became executive director of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County in the middle of a capital campaign, the same week Jonathan Hicken took over at the Seymour Center. Five years later, she's landed a $15 million farmland deal, a wil...
Drafting Our Strategic Dream Teams
There's a push right now to democratize strategic planning. Survey the community, poll the staff, put the big calls to a vote. I get the instinct, but it goes too far. Influence is not the same as decision-making power, and collaps...
Money in Motion, Not Money Warehoused
There's a number treated like gospel in philanthropy: the 5% annual payout private foundations are required to hit. It was written into law as a floor. Kristin Todd has watched it become a ceiling instead. After nearly two decades a...
Your Most Durable Asset Is Still Your Website
Everyone keeps predicting the death of the website. First it was social, now it is AI. But it is still the one channel you actually own and control, which is exactly what makes it your most durable asset. So when a site has gone untouched for f...
Can Business Actually Be a Force for Good?
For the last 50 years, we've operated under a single dominant idea: the purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value. But what if this whole era of extraction and short-termism isn't the natural order at all? What if it's just a blip? S...
The Real Cost of Playing It Safe
Jonathan recently learned that the Seymour Center is about to absorb a permanent new expense in the $150,000 to $200,000 range. On a $2.2 million operating budget, that's roughly 10% of the whole thing, and it's not a one-time hit. ...
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...