How Do We Know

Description

 Why Filmmakers, Funders, and Evaluators Should Talk About Impact

What’s behind the big push to measure the influence of media? Is it to attract and please funders? Improve engagement strategies? Prove the power that film brings to social change? Join Active Voice and the Active Voice Lab for Story & Strategy for an interactive session about how different kinds of films can help fuel different kinds of movements. Using Festival films as examples, we’ll take an early peek at a new lexicon that creatives, funders, and evaluators can use to communicate intent and expectations of which measurement methods might tell us what we really want to know.

Ellen Schneider leads the Active Voice Lab for Story & Strategy, Active Voice’s incubator for new models for “engaged storytelling.” In 2001, with support from MacArthur and Ford Foundations, she founded Active Voice, a nationally recognized leader in the creative use of story-based media – such as Participant Media’s The Visitor and Food Inc – to put human faces on the issues of our times. Ellen was formerly the executive producer of P.O.V., PBS’s longest running independent documentary series. In the 1990s she created High Impact Television®, a technique for creating links between independent film, opinion leaders, grassroots organizations and other media. She executive produced and created the pilot TV series, Right Here, Right Now, which Entertainment Weekly called “a blueprint for what reality television should be all about.” Schneider lectures widely and has served on juries ranging from the Sundance Film Festival to the RioCine Festival in Brazil.

 
Shaady Salehi is executive director of Active Voice, a nationally recognized organization that tackles social issues through the creative use of film. With a decade of experience working at the intersection of media and social change, Shaady oversees Active Voice’s diverse portfolio of film campaigns and provides consultation to filmmakers and funders about using stories for social impact. She has spoken extensively at conferences and film festivals around the country, and has sat on review panels for the San Francisco Film Society and the BAVC Producer’s Institute. She also serves on the board of Let It Ripple, a nonprofit that experiments with collaborative filmmaking for the common good. She holds an M.S. in strategic communications from Columbia University, an M.A. in cultural anthropology from UC Davis and a B.A. in anthropology from Oberlin College.