Digital Storytellers

Digital Storytellers’ mission is to enable powerful storytelling for impact. They believe in the tremendous opportunity that social technology has made available and feel that now more than ever is the time people can use powerful stories to make a real difference in the lives of others, the wellbeing of our planet, and future generations.

With expertise in filmmaking, video production, design, web technologies, crowdsourcing and social media, they help stories for change come to life and reach wider audiences in a number of ways. They produce films, capture events, enable event broadcasts and live online participation, create platforms necessary to support these, and also run workshops and clinics that help change making organisations and individuals learn how to tell, produce and get their own stories out into the world. Constantly innovating and seeking to serve their community, they have designed the Story Canvas and launched Stories for Impact, an initiative that seeks to enable a community of impact storytellers and to eventually create a platform that amplifies these stories for change.

“As a young start-up social enterprise experiencing massive growth, we knew we needed to operate differently, yet had been struggling to decide on how. Just one clinic with TDi helped our team crystalise some key insights around our market’s needs and made us rethink how we structured our offerings”

— Mikey Leung, Co-founder & Director at Digital Storytellers”

Their challenge is to develop a viable business model that allows them to meet both their social and financial goals. The change making and social sector can be thin on budgets, restricted by grant limitations, and unable to predict when the next round of funding might come though. Many of their customers are organisations that may also have experienced funding cuts, or are grassroot change makers and social entrepreneurs with little or no funding. There also isn’t full understanding of the benefits that good digital storytelling can bring and hence, there is unwillingness to invest budgets in digital storytelling.

As a result, Digital Storytellers have launched Stories for Impact, a new offering that enables change makers, social entrepreneurs and not-for-profits of all sizes to tell powerful impact stories even on a small budget. They also learned that unbundling their services to make them more accessible meant they could better service their customer’s needs, and simultaneously monetise better for the financial viability of their enterprise.

“We’d highly recommend a workshop or session with TDi; it could catalyse your social enterprise’s growth the way it did with ours, and at the very least provide you with crucial business thinking that is central to the success of any enterprise.”

– Mikey Leung, Co-founder & Director at Digital Storytellers

Digital Storytellers initially worked with TDi as a partner, creating stunning video case studies on some of the social enterprises we work with. However, TDi saw huge potential to improve the enterprise’s business model, and so started working with Digital Storytellers to become Investment Ready.

This involved intentionally designing a new financial model, one that consistently generates a surplus. Many social enterprises live with constant stress and fear over their financial health, which make it hard to focus on the opportunities in front of them. “By ensuring that the organisation is constantly in the black, rather than in the red, we empower them to say yes to the right projects, and start to increase the scale of their operations. This ensures their longevity, and enables them to tell more and more fantastic stories.”