By Áine O’Brien

Unlike academic circles where the ‘impact agenda’ has caused a good deal of rancorous (arguably myopic) debate, social documentary filmmaking takes ‘impact’ pretty much for granted. So much so that ‘impact evaluation’ is increasingly being considered as an integral component of the storytelling process – at least in some quarters.

A Center for Social Media working paper Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact suggests filmmakers can play a significant role in ‘defining the goals, outcomes and evolution of their projects’. And the paper offers some persuasive models of what a re-imagined social documentary craft might look like, should it borrow from trends in current ‘design thinking’:

Documentarians can take inspiration from successful efforts by other types of creators to incorporate evaluation into the life cycle of production – and to reconceptualise production as an ongoing and iterative service rather than one-time creation…’design thinking’ offers an alternative approach that can help documentary makers think about how research and evaluation will increase the impact of their projects.

But can impact really be tracked at such an early stage of documentary? What comes first the ‘story’ or the ‘strategic campaign’? What’s at stake in integrating both from the get go? Isn’t documentary storytelling, at its best, unpredictable? And is there danger of overly engineering the documentary story, when design principles take precedent?

Despite these niggling concerns, Designing for Impact is worth a read. It outlines ways to re-think how impact evaluation can play a central role in documentary craft. And for filmmakers interested in breaking new ground and audiences in the production of migration stories, one specific line from this publication seems key: Documentary filmmakers are learning not to just tell the story within their film, but to dynamically communicate the power and progress of the project to stakeholders.

Definitely avenues to be explored further in One Stop Doc at Counterpoints Arts.