Marketing Environmental Stewardship: Creating Brand Messaging for Nonprofits Engaged in Ecological Activism
Skip other details (including permanent urls, DOI, citation information)
Integrating storytelling about environmental stewardship into media production curricula has proven useful across my years of teaching—most recently adopting an approach that pairs students’ desire to do good in the world with their desire to develop employable production skills. My experience reflects the opportunities of values-driven course design when multiple motivations are at play. By drawing students into client-based relationships with local conservation and outdoor education organizations, I have found success navigating the often-disorienting mix of inclinations and obligations that can shape our work in the nonfiction media production classroom, teaching about the truths of our social reality while also preparing students for professional success. Recent examples of student work in this space include brand identity stories (90 seconds – 2 minutes) and social media promos (30 – 60 seconds) as follows:
Looptworks is a Portland, Oregon-based B Corp sustainable apparel company that downcycles, recycles, and upcycles discarded goods and materials to create high quality products.
Oregon Wild: The Photographer (2018)
Oregon Wild is a non-profit organization working to protect and restore Oregon wildlands, wildlife, and waters.
Explore Nature: “Sizzle Reel” (2018)
Explore Nature is a consortium of environmental conservation groups offering ecotourism opportunities to the public on the northern coast of Oregon.
Wild Diversity: “Social Media Promos” (2021)
Wild Diversity is a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit organization connecting Black, Indigenous, all People of Color (BIPOC) and LGBTQ2S+ communities to the outdoors.
Prior to building a curriculum around the production of branded video content for clients, I used a model for teaching filmmaking skills in the context of intensive experiences in short form documentary-making. From 2008-2012, I led students in a series of productions structured around The International Documentary Challenge, a now-defunct, timed filmmaking competition. Over this period, four of the ten films we produced fell into the contest category of “nature/environmental” documentary, which allowed us to capitalize on our proximity to a cinematic set of climates and geographies within driving distance of our city of Portland, Oregon, and a well-established regional outdoor culture abundant with mission-driven activities and character-centric stories tied to environmental stewardship. By “environmental stewardship,” I mean the act of caretaking natural resources “owned” in common. This dovetails with my philosophy that documentary filmmaking is not just a media arts practice, but a primer on developing the habits of good citizenship.
The contest format of Doc Challenge created a sense of urgency and supplied a framework for the filmmaking enterprise itself, including consequential deadlines and built-in audiences in the form of judges and contest-entry viewers, and dangled the possibility of winning accolades through contest prize categories and a screening at Hot Docs International in Toronto, Canada.
The resulting films were influenced by aesthetic and structural considerations of the documentary form and were produced much like independent documentaries are produced in terms of their non-commercial ethic; small crews dividing labor but also sharing responsibility for the storytelling and creative success of the finished product; and fidelity to a controlling theme and purpose. The result was a set of hyper-local, ecologically-concerned short films (around 10 minutes in length) the themes of which mirrored environmental issues more broadly. Resulting films were:
Jetty profiles a "Mom and Pop" fishery on the Oregon Coast that is threatened by an ecologically unsustainable crabbing policy.
Pipe Dream examines the debate over controversial liquid natural gas pipelines proposed for construction across Oregon.
Death Goes Green is an intimate portrait of the pioneers of Oregon's green burial movement.
Into the Sea chronicles the history of Bayocean, an Oregon seaside resort that fell into the ocean in the last century, and a current town, Neskowin, that is likewise threatened by coastal erosion.
The success of this multi-class, multiyear filmmaking endeavor was rooted in student buy-in to the course’s intensive team production format, a format designed to deliver competencies in independent filmmaking while promoting thoughtful engagement with a set of issues relevant to the storytellers’ own (literal) ecosystem. Taking advantage of Oregon’s natural beauty and the connectedness of many of its residents to the natural environment, these films capitalized on the cinematic potential baked into the story and the passion of the participants who had an urgent story to tell about the land.
In 2016, I devised a new framework for working with students in production-intensive environments, only this time, manufacturing stakes through client expectations in the making of branded video content for small organizations. Both the new “Branded Media Production” model and the previous “Documentary Film Production” model asked students to participate in a stakes-based creative collaboration to produce work for particular audiences on a deadline, and with a pre-established destination for the work. While both approaches yielded a significant subset of work addressing environmental stewardship, and both employed non-fiction filmmaking practices, the branded media model also taught a skill set that could recommend students for work-for-hire in an explicitly commercial space, and especially for purpose-driven organizations.
The transition from providing students with experiences in independent documentary filmmaking to client-based non-fiction media production mirrored the trajectory of my own filmmaking where, after producing a series of long-form independent documentary projects in the 2000s, I began partnering with already established enterprises with pre-existing budgets and audiences in the 2010s; offering my filmmaking skill set in service to the mission of organizations who shared my personal and political values. Simultaneously, as marketers moved into the space of idealism and environmental conservation (albeit with a penchant for greenwashing corporate business practices), student familiarity with message-driven marketing grew as did job opportunities in this segment of the media production industry. My previous pedagogical practices, focused on training students in independent documentary filmmaking, evolved to include training in the monetization of documentary filmmaking skill sets. This shift was partly in response to growing student desire to develop professional skills specific to media production, and partly to better serve the over 30% of Portland State University students who are first-generation college students and after graduation are less likely to find employment appropriate to their credentials than their peers. Our significant cohort of transfer students from community college also influenced this shift because of the “workforce development” ethic they bring to the program.
Student opportunities to leverage documentary storytelling skills to secure work include media production for government agencies, non-profit organizations, and small businesses. Jobs might include oral history projects, identity pieces (which demonstrate an organization’s values), educational documentaries, and fundraising appeals. Opportunities originate from one’s reputation as a documentary filmmaker, successful responses to published RFPs (requests for proposals), and by building a body of high-quality work in non-fiction branded video. While budgets for this work vary widely, students can expect that much purpose-driven content is made on slim margins that require the contractor to wear many hats across the production process—a great way to sharpen independent filmmaking and entrepreneurial skills and make some money in the process.
Courtney Hermann is an Associate Professor of Film at Portland State University, an independent documentary filmmaker, and a non-fiction media producer. Courtney's work is distributed by Public Broadcasting Service and its affiliates, through educational film catalogs, at film festivals, and through impact distribution to community partners. Courtney earned her MFA degree in Film and Video Production from Columbia College Chicago. She has 20 years of full-time experience teaching degree-seeking film and video production students at regionally accredited colleges and universities. Courtney co-authored the 7th edition of Directing the Documentary by Michael Rabiger.
