About the guide
We created the Impact Field Guide to support you and your film to contribute to positive change in society. It’s a collection of ideas, tools, and examples intended to clarify concepts, inspire new thinking, provide practical solutions, and spark audacity. It reflects countless contributors, decades of collective experience, and a confrontation with errors and omissions that we’ve made in the past.
We want to help you to understand — and to make the argument to others — about why documentary films are well-suited for impact. We want you to consider that HOW you make your film — and the relationships you have with your participants — can be just as impactful as the film you make. We want to support you to create impact strategies that are informed by an understanding of how change happens, the types of impact you can have, the context in which your story is being told, and how audiences may respond to your film. We want to help unleash your creativity to bring your strategy to life. We want to ensure you grasp the skills and capabilities you will need. We want to enable you to create effective partnerships built upon a foundation of integrity, transparency, and trust. We want you to get your film seen and, ultimately, to be able to determine — and communicate about — the impact you were able to achieve.
There’s never only one answer or approach, so take what we share and sculpt it to fit the unique challenges — and opportunities — your film presents.
We created this latest version of the Impact Field Guide at a time at which the space to share stories is shrinking, government censorship is on the rise, public service broadcasters are weakened, and corporations are picking and choosing the tales to be told, avoiding “risks” that might put them out of favour with those who influence their bottom lines. But we all do what we do because we must, and we’re not going to stop now. Impact production and impact distribution has never been more relevant. In fact, collectively we’re going to get even better at it.
The Power of Documentary Film
Let’s start with what we believe is a given: good stories provoke new thinking and emotions that can inspire people to act. You likely wouldn’t be here, reading this sentence, if you didn’t feel the same way.
We’re not alone.
Cultural strategy, as a field of practice, sees storytellers like filmmakers and other artists as potential “agents of social change” who “crack open, reimagine, and rewrite fiercely held narratives.” Cultural strategists posit that these new stories can change how people view themselves and the role they play in the world, which — with organizing — could lead them to act alongside others to change society.
As an art form which is reality based, documentary has a proud historical relationship to questions of social justice – or rather injustice. A documentary film can shine a light on, invigorate, or re-invigorate an issue that is struggling to gain the attention it needs for progress to be made. It can elevate innovations that others can adopt to improve their circumstances, their communities, the planet. It can provide an opportunity to bring people and organizations that share common goals together to use their collective power.
Often, we speak about documentary films as providing an opportunity for audiences to understand better a social issue that may feel otherwise abstract. Through a film, we are invited into the lives of real people, and we can see how the injustices with which they are confronted affect their lives.
This idea — of storytelling generating empathy — is based in science, but it’s also based, as Sonya Childress of Color Congress has written, “on the assumption that subjects of documentary films are so foreign to the audience that they must be transported into the world of this person or culture in order to empathize with their plight.” Childress believes this “the empathy frame” is a distraction and, among other “strategic uses,” documentary films have the ability “to empower and validate those who rarely see their experience on screen.”
At a time when governments, algorithms and market forces are narrowing and flattening the range of voices available to us, the ability for audiences to find and watch documentaries made by filmmakers from historically marginalized communities and/or with non-mainstream perspectives is essential work.
What’s New?
The last version of the Impact Field Guide was a beast — a beautiful and generous beast, but a beast, nevertheless. It was LONG and, as time wore on, resources that we cited in the Guide often became outdated.
Our intention with this version of the Guide was to make it more user friendly, a true “field” guide that you could pull up on your phone while out in, well, the field.
We knew without a doubt that we needed to do a better job of diversifying our sources, but we also wanted to give space to others to represent themselves, versus interpreting their work through our eyes. What does this mean practically? It means we’ve cut back on the anecdotes and focused on making space for organizations around the world doing good work you need to know about and be able to access — and which just might be in your proverbial backyard.
We’ve created a database of resources of tools, organizations, trainings, case studies, templates, funding opportunities, and more that, we hope, will introduce you to new allies and new approaches. We also hope this database will grow over time — with your help.
Earlier versions of this guide were published in 2014 and 2019. While we’re excited about the changes we’ve made — and how they truly reflect the growth and progress in our community — this Impact Field Guide was built upon the shoulders of those who created versions 1.0 and 2.0.