Transmedia has been the buzzword in the entertainment business for quite some time.
A long excerpt from a post by Lina Srivastava
Nonprofits engaged in social change initiatives should view storytelling as a necessary component of mission-fulfillment. Any individual institution engaging an audience—whether beneficiaries, funders, board members, community or other stakeholders—is required to convey clearly and artfully what it does, how its does it, where its work is most effective and necessary, and why they should support efforts to continue or grow the institution’s work.
In the larger view of systemic change, storytelling takes on an even bigger role, where a well-told story creates a shared experience and helps illuminate all factors (root cause and symptomatic) that effect social change efforts at both global and local levels, creating a comprehensive, connected, “best practice” view of achieving progress.
Nonprofits dealing with social change don’t need to get into the business of content production or multiplatform distribution—but it is a digital world now. It’s likely time to add storytelling to the task list.
Lina has a great point. And with the barrier to entry of digital storytelling continuously falling, and the importance of storytelling ever more important, it would be worth any organization's time to explore how they can best tell their story, and even how they can enlist their own intended audience to help craft that story in a way that will resonate through-out their extended networks. It isn't about user-generated content, so much as being enagaged and in charge of the telling of the story. If you are not telling your story in a way that enlists your audience, then you are producing and directing a potential flop. Remember...all the world's a stage
