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
Feelings Don't Drive Change
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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, joins Eric in the studio to argue that the third ingredient, what she calls "the hands", is where campaigns succeed or quietly die. Not more awareness, not more storytelling, but actionable pathways that give audiences something real to do with everything they now know and feel.
Episode Highlights:
[00:01:30] The head, heart, and hands framework for social impact campaigns
[00:05:00] "the hands": actionable, attainable pathways that create real impact
[00:06:00] Why "the hands" breakout at Skoll World Forum was the most well-attended
[00:10:00] The celebrity collaboration that drove 30K subscribers but didn't change healthcare
[00:15:30] Vote by mail in 2020: same message, radically different messengers
[00:26:00] The end-of-year fundraising campaign that 5X'd revenue
Notable Quotes:
Saralynn Finn [00:06:00]: "It's the piece of most campaigns that's missing, that people are trying to break the nut of and figure out: how do I create a pathway?"
Eric Ressler [00:13:00]: "Campaigns need their own little mini theory of change."
Resources & Links:
- Skoll World Forum — https://skoll.org/skoll-world-forum/
- Represent Us — https://represent.us/
- Saralynn's LinkedIn article about the AI documentary in Rural America.
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.
→ Subscribe: designingtomorrow.show → Work with Cosmic: designbycosmic.com
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.
