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.
Designing Tomorrow: Creative Strategies for Social Impact
What's Your Truth?
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode, I’m exploring a question that’s been showing up in a lot of our recent work — and in my own thinking:
What is your truth?
Links:
📝 Read the full essay version on our new Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/eressler/p/what-is-your-truth?r=8rkfl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=podcast&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Listeners, now you can text us your comments or questions by clicking this link.
*** If you liked this episode, please help spread the word. Share with your friends or co-workers, post it to social media, “follow” or “subscribe” in your podcast app, or write a review on Apple Podcasts. We could not do this without you!
We love hearing feedback from our community, so please email us with your questions or comments — including topics you’d like us to cover in future episodes — at podcast@designbycosmic.com
Thank you for all that you do for your cause and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about truth, not capital T truth, not facts or proof points or missing disinformation. I mean the kind of truth that sits below the surface, the kind of truth that can't be prompted into existence by an AI tool, or packaged into a slide deck by a strategist, or downloaded from a playbook. I started thinking about this after reading a recent piece by Paul Worthington on the increasing sameness of marketing in the age of AI. His argument goes something like this when tools like ChatGPT are becoming the go-to solution for building strategies and writing content and shaping campaigns, you end up with a blend of every best practice, every hot take and every expert tip floating around on the internet, which means you'll probably get a solid B but the ideas are not rooted in your truth. That's not how you stand out and it's definitely not how you build a brand and, honestly, this isn't just about marketing. Marketing is just one place where this problem will propagate.
Speaker 1:The real conversation is about how we as individuals, as organizations, as movements, choose to show up. So what's your truth? Not your slogan or your CTA, not your quarterly campaign. Your lived experience, your greater purpose, the deep sense of knowing that fuels the work, because without that, what are we even doing here? We're just performing checking boxes, chasing algorithms, optimizing for engagement while forgetting about resonance. This is especially complicated in the social impact space. We have to realign with donor priorities. We have to prove our impact. We have to speak to multiple audiences with different power dynamics. We have to balance community insight with institutional expectations. But if we lose sight of our own truth in the process, if we can tort our message too far to meet someone else's idea of what's important, we risk erasing what's most valuable about the work. Lately we've been in a deep partnership with the Institute for Social Transformation at UCSC and it's reminded me how important this is their approach to community-led research and co-creation. It's a powerful reminder that you can't build meaningful solutions without lived experience at the center, and no AI, no consultant, no philanthropist or funder, no matter how experienced or powerful or connected they are, can replicate that.
Speaker 1:So I've been reflecting what's our truth as a brand, as a team, as individuals doing this work every day. How do we make sure we're creating from that truth and not just reacting to trends or repackaging what worked last time or chasing someone else's version of what success looks like? I don't have all the answers, but I know this the brands, the campaigns and organizations that resonate most, the ones that make you feel something, are the ones that speak from a deep place of knowing. That takes reflection, it takes courage, it takes a willingness to be different and, to be honest, that's what I'm trying to do right now and how I'm trying to show up as a human being doing this work. You may have noticed a shift in my content lately. That's not an accident. We've spent years sharing tips and tricks and frameworks and playbooks, and if that's what you're after, you can still find a ton of that on our website, and it's legit stuff too. But lately that's not what's driving me and, if I'm being honest, it's not what's lighting me up. So it's not what I'm publishing, and if it means fewer clicks or lower conversion rates, so be it.
Speaker 1:So what does this all mean for you as a social impact leader? It means you might need to slow down before you speed up and reconnect with the core of your work, revisit your lived experience, create space for your team and your community to share theirs, and then ask what do we know to be true, what are we here to change and what would it look like to communicate from that place every time, in a moment of infinite content. Ruthlessly, radically creating from that truth is a massive differentiator. Quiet clarity might just be the loudest move you can make right now. So what's your truth? I'd love to hear from you. What does truth look like for your organization right now? How are you navigating that tension between resonance and performance, and what's getting in the way of you creating from that truth in this moment? Shoot me an email, eric, at designbycosmiccom, and let me know. I read and respond to every message. I'm Eric Ressler, and this has been Designing Tomorrow, tomorrow.
