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
Who Actually Gets a Seat at the Table?
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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 can make a call? Taylor Stuckert, CEO of Lead for America, has lived this tension from every angle. Eric and Taylor dig into the question nobody in social impact wants to ask out loud: can too much community input actually be a problem?
Episode Highlights:
[00:01:30] Wilmington, Ohio and the day DHL disappeared
[00:06:30] The guerrilla flyer campaign that drew hundreds to a town hall
[00:08:30] When community input becomes a double-edged sword
[00:14:00] Stop trying to please everyone
[00:17:30] There is no "the community"
[00:28:00] Why the brain drain narrative misses the bigger story
[00:37:00] Why AI will widen the divide we never closed
Notable Quotes:
Taylor Stuckert [00:17:40]: "We act as if the community is this unified object that has complete consensus and you're either engaging them or you're not. And that's just so inaccurate to reality."
Taylor Stuckert [00:14:10]: "We have to get away from this notion that we're going to make perfect decisions. You're not going to please everyone — but that shouldn't take away from how we engage everyone."
Resources & Links:
- Lead for America — https://www.leadforamerica.org/
- American Connection Corps — https://www.leadforamerica.org/
- Carnegie Corporation of New York — https://www.carnegie.org/
Hosted by Eric Ressler, Founder & Creative Director of Cosmic, with co-host Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. New episodes every Tuesday.
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