Community-led storytelling for Corporate Social Responsibility campaigns: centering communities experiences and maximising impact.

This proposal develops research on community-led storytelling into a set of consultancy services for corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns. The research this proposal builds on focused on the significant potential of arts-based methods and participatory storytelling to enable participants to activate and represent their perceptions in a way that restores agency to their lived experience.

For a number of years now, the private sector has become involved in projects that generate and contribute to social and environmental impact, including in relation to the UN 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development. The scale and ambition of companies' investments in corporate social responsibility has grown and so have customers' expectations. Evidence shows that customers reward companies who are perceived to have a strong social and environmental impact, but tend to dismiss companies who are 'impact washing'. Research confirms that the image of a company is in considerable part derived from its CSR activities. However, CSR campaigns tend to neglect the point of view of the beneficiary community and companies miss opportunities to demonstrate the full impact of their interventions. In response to this, our proposal provides evidence-based consultancy services on how to engage communities and build capacity so that community members become storytelling leaders. In this way, the community itself is empowered to produce content that reflects their lived experiences and response to CSR interventions. Our service will offer companies with better CSR messaging, but also generate sustainable, ethical and empowering media practices.

The market landscape for CSR content includes marketing agencies, content production companies and in-person engagement programmes. Marketing agencies produce industry standard strategies for CSR messaging, but tend to neglect the point of view of the beneficiaries, since their processes rarely include engagement programmes. Content production companies, often working alongside marketing agencies, produce glossy content, which tends to frame beneficiaries and their experiences from an external point of view, often resulting in a commodification of compassion that customers can easily detect (Golob & Verk 2022). In-person engagement programmes, often delivered by NGOs, offer great opportunities for beneficiary engagement, but too often fail to adequately harness the storytelling opportunities of this engagement. Our intention is to bring together these different skills in novel ways through easy-to access-and-engage-with consultancy services, thereby applying our knowledge of content-production with the skills required to engage and champion beneficiaries in self-representing their experiences.

Our aim is to provide our expertise and experience to Corporates through a mechanism and vehicle that makes it simple and straightforward for them to access, use and apply. We aim to commercialise our arts-led research initially through consultancy services. This allows companies to take and apply the methods and practices developed during our research to maximise their impact, whilst championing the agency and point of view of the beneficiaries.
The grant will be used to support a number of activities designed primarily to:
- Develop a better understanding of potential clients' business needs;
- Understand business model and preferred routes to market.
We will seek out potential early customers and develop 4 commercial knowledge exchange activities with them to understand their business needs and response to the service. These activities are designed to allow us to increase our understanding of potential clients' needs and operating requirements and to refine our offering.

Our aim is to enable companies to bring vulnerable communities at the centre of CSR storytelling and promote ethical participatory media practices.