We were excited to learn that some serious attention and resources are being allocated to understanding how films can have a stronger social impact.
Participant Media has teamed up with the the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to develop a Nielsen-like rating system to measure film exposure and related audience activity.
The partnership is a sign of growing interest in film as a medium for driving social movements forward.
The Gates Foundation has backed movies like “Waiting for ‘Superman’” to help advance its mission. Participant Media has invested in the movies “Lincoln” to drive civic engagement and “Promiseland” to raise awareness of anti-fracking. The former was a hit, the latter a bust at the box office and in the larger anti-fracking engagement that it failed to spawn.
The hope is that the new rating system will help explain why and enable sharper focus and rapid course correction in what is often guesswork campaigning to inspire action.
The Participant Index will calculate a film’s rating by conducting online surveys about emotional response and engagement to the film, then by comparing that to the raw number of people who saw the film and the amount of conventional and social media activity that resulted from it.
You can read this New York Times story for the full lowdown.