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
100 episodes
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...
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...