Dirty Money
Opportunities & challenges for NGOs producing interactive documentaries
Glyn Thomas
World Development Movement
At the World Development Movement we recently (November 2013) released an interactive documentary ‘Dirty Money’ exploring the links between coal mining in Indonesia and the UK finance sector, incorporating photos, voiceover, video, text and infographics.
As one of the first UK NGOs to produce an interactive documentary, we also incorporated into the documentary a way for people to take part in our campaign and to sign up to our email list.
It has so far proved to be very successful, with over 500 views on the first day of launch and viewers spending over 6 minutes on average exploring the content. 10% of viewers went on to take action and half of these then went on to immediately express interest in taking part in an offline action as well. There is clearly huge potential for charities and NGOs to use interactive documentaries to encourage people to take action and for NGOs and charities to use them to engage their supporters as well as recruiting new supporters.
The session at i-docs 2014 will explore the opportunities for NGOs and charities, look at what WDM did with ‘Dirty Money’ as well exploring the successes and learning points from the project, as well as looking at some of the challenges for NGOs in producing interactive documentaries.