Distribution? Outreach? Community Engagement?

From The Fledgling Fund

Yeah, we hear you.  It can all be very confusing. 

So, I thought I would write a little bit about what we mean when we talk about distribution, outreach and community engagement.  The Fledgling Fund's mission is, in short, to inspire social change through the use of creative media and storytelling.  We accomplish that by supporting projects (documentary film and other less traditional media) that look beyond the mere distribution of their media and actually start to engage their audiences in innovative ways.

Essentially, we ask the questions:  What happens when the lights come up?  What happens when someone sees your film or other media and then asks - "What can I do?"  How do you turn the emotion, inspiration and energy that someone feels after experiencing your media into action?  How do those individual actions aggregate and build a social movement or support an existing one? 

Those questions are fundamental to every funding decision we make and the answers to them are how we achieve our mission.  So, we want to be clear - when we talk about social change through media, we are not talking about distribution.  We are really talking about OUTREACH that leads to COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT.  To us, while distribution is the first step to community engagement, because clearly people have to see your media in order to be inspired, what we really look for is the subsequent steps after distribution.  We want to know how people are staying engaged and active with the social issue after they have seen your media.  We want to see that the media was only the first step in their involvement.  And, in most cases, distribution is not enough to achieve that level of engagement. Most people need to be "spoon-fed" ideas about how to get involved and they need to feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves so they know they are making a difference. One way we can define community engagement, then, is giving people meaningful, tangible ways to get involved and then connecting those actions with the larger movement.