making media
move culture
disruptive storytelling for social change & sense making.
Intro
M³C (Making Media Move Culture ©) is a digital communications media lab, and a formula for improving the future with stories, and tools rooted in social change and sense making. Founded by Thomas Mofolo in 2016, the lab specialises in project managing digital outreach & advocacy campaigns, Communication for Development (C4D), civic journalism, reparative media, and social innovation.
Most of the work and support provided by the lab is carried out remotely on a fixed-term consultancy basis in collaboration with a network of independent consultants, non-profits, civil society organisations, social movements, activists, and freelance creative talent. Additionally, the lab also operates as a think tank that produces research related to critical social media pedagogy, and futures literacy for civic transformation.
Expertise
Content strategy + Campaign planning
1. Challenging the status quo:
The lab's approach to narrative development is based on addressing unresolved or emerging social issues with critical analysis of current affairs 🔍, social commentary inspired by concerned citizens, and insights generated from digital discourse about a specific crisis, cause, or industry. The main deliverables for this work include bespoke content plans, editorial calendars 📆, and messaging toolkits for how to conscientise the public, and work towards a resolution.
Creative direction +
MultiMedia production
2. Bringing stories to life:
The creative process for each project involves collaboration with various freelance creative talent (filmmakers, writers, photographers, and designers) for multimedia content creation 📲, and transmedia storytelling. The outputs for this work also include digital prototypes and visual communication templates or aesthetics 🎨 that can enhance a storyline.
Community building +
Culture hacking
3. Making media move culture:
Lastly, the most challenging and rewarding work; starting a conversation 🗣with the public to persuade action 📢, and co create a shared future, or a collective solution. The roll-out for this work is achieved via interactive civic engagement, and digital mobilisation on leading social media platforms. This is an iterative process that is continually refined with participatory monitoring and evaluation, then concluded with impact assessment and reporting.
Trusted and approved by
Portfolio
ONE Campaign: 2022 Surge Campaigns
The ONE Campaign is a global advocacy organisation campaigning to end extreme poverty and preventable diseases by 2030, so that everyone, everywhere can lead a life of dignity with equal opportunity. ONE was founded in 2004 by American attorney Bobby Shriver and U2's frontman Bono, along with a coalition of 11 non-profit humanitarian and advocacy organizations. Following the outbreak of the Coronavirus in 2019, their strategic focus for 2022 was a year long surge campaign focused on enhancing communications that promoted various post pandemic recovery initiatives across Africa.
The mandate for this project was to collaborate with ONE's content, digital innovation and insight teams, to help manage the ONE.org/Africa website, and its social media channels to ensure that they remain an effective tool in support of ONE’s campaigning and advocacy work in different African regions. Among the many initiatives launched under the surge campaign included: The Global Week of Action (#EndThePandemic), the #MythOrVax campaign in partnership with TikTok Africa to challenge vaccine misinformation, The People's Call To Action on Jobs in Africa (#JobsNowAfrica), and many more.
The first campaign launched in 2022 was the Global Week of Action - a global call to make COVID history. The Global Week of Action was an important opportunity to mobilise and call on world leaders to ensure that COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments are not luxury items. All countries should have had the means to fight the pandemic but instead some countries were rolling out programmes for booster shots.
As part of the campaign we also created a number of offline activities which were covered online via social media to drive traffic to ONE's petition for world leaders to take action against the issues which we were bringing to their attention.
In 2021 ONE, UNICEF, and the African Union launched a new campaign on TikTok to counter false information about COVID-19 vaccines.
As part of their ONE World campaign, they were calling for a global response plan to the pandemic, including global vaccine equity. In Africa, vaccine rollouts were slow to start, with only 2% of Africa’s population fully vaccinated. Part of the issue was supply — wealthy countries were hoarding doses and not doing enough to ensure equitable access to vaccines.
Another major barrier was hesitancy and misinformation about vaccines. The spread of misinformation on the continent was on the rise due to social media, which can “quickly go viral and disrupt vaccination campaigns.” Countering this misinformation and sharing the facts about vaccines was crucial to ending the pandemic. Vaccine uptake was particularly low in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 36 million doses administered in Africa, just 6 million doses were in sub-Saharan Africa as of the end of June 2021.
This is where the #MythOrVax campaign comes in - to dispel myths and combat inaccurate information, address ongoing fears and concerns, and raise awareness about the importance of COVID-19 vaccinations in Africa. The campaign featured some of the continent’s biggest music and entertainment acts, like Yemi Alade from Nigeria, SautiSol from Kenya, Maps from South Africa, and Pearl Thusi. Each challenge featured a live stream on TikTok that pairs celebrities with health experts across the continent and the globe to combat vaccine misinformation.
In 2022 the second phase of the campaign was launched in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya. The mandate was to create social media content that promoted the TikTok filters and collaborate with the ONE team and TikTok Africa for strategic planning and rollout. Following the success of Drake's Certified Lover Boy album which was released in 2021 we took inspiration from the artwork and decided to only use emojis to communicate the various themes of misinformation. In the end we managed to generate 76.5 million views of cumulative engagement from #MythOrVax phase 1 with over 10,000 videos uploaded.
How can we start solving youth unemployment more collaboratively? Many young people throughout Africa are looking for a decent job but struggling to find available opportunities. According to data from the International Labour Organization (ILO), almost half of Africa’s youth in the workforce were either unemployed or working poor in 2019. Since the pandemic hit, more people are out of jobs than ever before, with women and young people impacted the most.
To address this urgent issue of unemployment, ONE launched the #JobsNowAfrica Campaign to help create 15 million decent jobs in Africa each year by 2025. 60% of Africa’s population is below the age of 25 and 67% is under 30. Africa needs about 15 million new decent jobs every year to absorb its booming young population. But Africa’s youth is not being given the opportunities it needs to fulfil its potential and may reach crisis point if we do not act now. This initiative was created in collaboration with youth networks, think-tanks, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), businesses, and industry experts to address employment problems in Africa. These growing partnerships span across different regions of Africa, and are dedicated to helping young people across the continent realize their full potential.
For the launch of the initiative in South Africa ONE partnered up with Youth Capital, a youth-led campaign with an Action Plan to shift gears on youth unemployment. As part of the launch they collaborated with Eh!woza to produce "I’ve been trying; 8 years without a job", a short documentary film narrated by Pearl Thusi that uncovers the real challenges young people face on their journey to employment. Eh!woza operates at the intersection of science communication, youth advocacy, community engagement, and skills development to merge the biomedicine of disease with its social impact. Their various programmes recruit high school students and young adults from areas with high rates of HIV and TB to practical workshops that engage participants with high-impact local biomedical research. Beneficiaries are enrolled in creative workshops that provide technical skills, equipment, and conceptual guidance, to produce documentaries, music, poetry and music videos that reflect the individual, social, and emotional cost of disease. They disseminate media to conscientise the public on issues of health and disease.
To support this initiative we collaborated with Youth Capital to produce and host a number of Twitter Space events featuring policy makers, creatives, and activists to explore solutions and new possibilities for solving the youth unemployment crisis. Key deliverables for this project included social media management, and content creation by way of scripting, hosting, and moderating panel discussions.
Later in the year we took the campaign to Rwanda for the annual Youth Connekt Summit in Kigali, and mobilised ONE's youth activists to campaign for the initiative on the ground while also equipping them with digital toolkits to promote their efforts online via social media.
Viewfinder is an accountability journalism project in South Africa that specializes in long term investigations into abuses of power which impact on the public interest – specifically as it relates to the need for equality and redress – in post-apartheid South African society.
Through narrative journalism, documentary filmmaking, and inter-newsroom collaborations Viewfinder makes complex findings accessible to audiences across the spectrum of South African news media consumers by providing audiences with the knowledge they need to demand accountability from large institutions on the specific abuses of power that they expose.
In May 2021 they launched "Above The Law" a new investigative project which reveals how police management protects officers accused of unlawful killings, and other violent crimes, from consequences. The mandate for this project was to carry out the newsroom's digital engagement reporting and support with publishing and distributing content across other media channels; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, and Email. All content was laid out and managed on Wordpress for desktop and mobile viewing. Unlike other campaigns previously managed, this experience was truly unique in that no original content was created in the lab. The newsroom produced all the long form editorials and copy for social media.
Additional support provided included pay per click advertising of select social media content and listening in on parliamentary sessions concerning governments response to the investigation. Weekly analytics and performance metrics were recorded and reported on the newsroom's impact log which also required tracking of all external media coverage that the investigation was receiving on social and mainstream media. The lab also assisted with the strategic planning of a new community engagement campaign that the newsroom plans on rolling out to reach black communities affected by police brutality.
