During a recent panel discussion I moderated, organized in collaboration with Robert Rippberger, I had the pleasure of speaking with Laurel Felt, PhD, Margot Fahnestock, Mugambi Nthiga , and Namir Nava, four brilliant leaders from organisations that create social and behaviour change (SBC) dramas across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Together, we explored what it really takes for a drama to move people, influence norms, and create sustained change, as well as how digital channels are transforming the field. In this post, I’ll break down some of the biggest insights from our conversation, and why I think they matter for anyone working in SBC or social impact entertainment.

This session explores how Harmony Labs and Earth Alliance collaborated to identify and engage audiences missing from the climate conversation, blending together in one pilot project groundbreaking behavioral media research with influencer partnerships and media testing and iteration. Harmony Labs Executive Director Brian Waniewski shares key research findings and showcase how these findings informed an influencer media strategy to connect with untapped audiences, offering climate communicators new pathways for engaging diverse communities. (04:29–06:55) They created content with 60 creators through co-productions and a creators fund—rather than scripted ads—with two goals: engagement and transporting audiences toward awareness, pro-climate futures, and participation. (07:26–09:14) Using their Narrative Observatory, they tracked media behavior from half-million US panelists, mapping how people move through media and which values shape their consumption. (09:14–13:07) Identified a key overlooked group: the “If You Say So” audience—online, culture makers who avoid news—so they tailored content to their values (autonomy, fun), not traditional activist messaging.

And the result is a new beta framework: INCITE — Inspiring Narrative Change Innovation through Tracking and Evaluation. This new learning and evaluation framework has been developed to equip the pop culture narrative change field — comprised of artists, values-aligned entertainment leaders and companies, movement leaders, cultural strategists, narrative researchers, philanthropic partners, and more — with a shared methodology to unearth learnings and track short and long-term impact, at both the individual and collective levels. This launch of the beta INCITE framework is the first step in a road testing process set to take place over 2024 to make it useful and usable by field members and funders alike.

This chapter highlights how Facebook can enable researchers to understand their audiences, why people choose to share content with friends and family and what that means for the kind of health content that works on Facebook. As the primary case study, the chapter describes an online graphic novel about depression called the Black Dog. The chapter highlights research that revealed three key insights on why people share entertainment-education campaigns like the Black Dog on social media. There are three primary reasons that people share content on Facebook: (1) to define who they are, (2) to be of value to their friends, and (3) to make a positive difference in their community or the world.

Evidence and Action Towards Safe and Nutritious Food (EatSafe) is looking to positively impact behavior around food safety practices in traditional markets around the world. As part of the program, Story Sourcing uses journalistic techniques to uncover stories and anecdotes from daily life that sheds light on people's motivations, fears, and aspirations. These stories, in turn, help guide the design and development of EatSafe food safety interventions. EatSafe previously conducted this work at traditional markets in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria.

Character.AI is bringing to life the science-fiction dream of open-ended conversations and collaborations with computers. We are building the next generation of dialog agents—with a long-tail of applications spanning entertainment, education, general question-answering and others. Our dialog agents are powered by our own proprietary technology based on large language models, built and trained from the ground up with conversation in mind. How does the Character.AI beta work? The Character.AI beta is based on neural language models. A supercomputer reads huge amounts of text and learns to hallucinate what words might come next in any given situation. Models like these have many uses including auto-complete and machine translation. At Character.AI, you collaborate with the computer to write a dialog - you write one character's lines, and the computer creates the other character's lines, giving you the illusion that you are talking with the other character.

If you knew that Bengaluru’s informal waste pickers stopped over 38 crores kilograms of waste from reaching the landfills every year so the waste could be recycled, wouldn’t you feel like making song to celebrate it? We already did! #InvaluableRecyclers

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Tested is an award-winning comic book that features diverse characters affected by a broad range of health conditions and related social issues. With a touch of heart and humor, 'Tested' depicts a diverse cast of characters affected by stigma, HIV, STIs, substance use, LGBTQ+ issues, and much more.

It found exposure to the drama led to significant changes in most outcomes with 37% of those who watched at least one episode showing behavioural intent to act, rising to 78% of those who had watched at least seven episodes. The show reached 59.6 million unique viewers, confirming drama as an effective, low cost and scalable tool to engage people around faecal sludge management – a critical and hard to address issue.

The UK regulator the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has launched the country’s first official anti-fraud jingle. The aim; to protect consumers against loan fee fraud. Between November 2020 and January 2021, some one in 20 calls received by the FCA were reporting an instance of loan fee fraud. The FCA’s anti-fraud jingle is designed to be a light-hearted, engaging way to spread awareness of loan fee fraud advice to consumers over Christmas. Loan fee fraud is when consumers are asked to pay an upfront fee for a loan or credit that they then never receive. With behavioural scientists INFLUENCE AT WORK and music production company Soviet Science, the song has been produced make loan fee fraud guidance more memorable and more shareable.

Results In the 34 day period after the three events with the strongest public attention (the song’s release, the MTV Video Music Awards 2017, and Grammy Awards 2018), Lifeline received an excess of 9915 calls (95% confidence interval 6594 to 13 236), an increase of 6.9% (95% confidence interval 4.6% to 9.2%, P

Welcome to the Entertainment Industry’s Guide to Mental Health Storytelling Developed by a groundbreaking coalition of mental health experts and entertainment industry leaders.

Subtitle: Case Studies for Theory and Practice Author: Lauren B. Frank, Ed. Paul Falzone, Ed.

(what to do as a writer on the set while shooting)

Changing The Narrative is a network of reporters, researchers, academics, and advocates concerned about the way media represents drug use and addiction. Our mission is to help journalists and opinion leaders provide accurate, humane, and scientifically-grounded information in this contested terrain. We offer expert sources —including people with lived experience of the issues — and up-to-date, fact-checked, and evidence-based information on news and controversies.

Brian Amman, ecologist for the Center for Disease Control, takes a look at disastrous pandemics from a variety of television shows and movies and breaks down...

However, when the ZCCP video was combined with the social nudge : “Many people in your community have also watched this video,’’ the video shifted the perception of social norms towards less acceptance of GBV i.e. people were more likely to believe that their community found GBV unacceptable and more likely to think that their community thought GBV was a serious issue.