Mapping the #InteractiveImpact Journey

Producing an interactive project is not the same as producing a film or book or TV show, for many reasons. The technology is new, the distribution options are less established and the invitation to interact or participate in a story can fundamentally change the relationship with your audience. Jessica Clark, journalist, media strategist, and director of Dot Connector Studio, offers a guided tour of the process that will help you think about impact strategies from beginning to end. Jessica will be speaking at TFI Interactive Day on Saturday, April 18th about media strategy. Become a TFI member for access and see the full lineup here.

How can interactive producers plan for and evaluate the impact of their projects? Over the past year, this question has animated a series of lively and wide-ranging in-person and phone conversations among members of Tribeca's Interactive Media Impact Working Group.

The goal for this initiative, supported by The Fledgling Fund and the Ford Foundation, is not to reduce the art of interactive nonfiction to a single framework or series of impact goals. Instead, the group has explored many dimensions and formats, delving into how process, funding, participatory philosophies, identity, politics, aesthetics and more contribute to high-impact productions.

Explore the most recent conversation for yourself in this Storify, plus wrap-ups from MIT's OpenDoc Lab and the Center for Media and Social Impact.

For the 2015 TFI Interactive event, we collaborated with designer John Bloch to sketch out the interactive producer's journey, above. You can download it here. We call it "Are We There Yet? A Roadmap for Creating High-Impact Interactive Documentary."

Developed with much input from the working group, this visualization is a first stab at trying to pull several different dimensions of the creation process into a single page. It's still a work in progress, so we welcome your comments below, or on Twitter via the hashtag #interactiveimpact.