Index Aims to Measure When Entertainment Leads to Activism

Participant Media, the company created by eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll to produce movies with a social message, is working on a tool to assess the impact of such activist entertainment in spurring viewers to action, according to The New York Times.

The firm is developing its Participant Index in conjunction with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, with funding from the Knight Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

The index takes into account audience numbers and social-media activity for issue-driven films, TV shows, and online videos and matches those measures with results of an online survey of viewers to assess their responses, in terms of both emotional involvement and concrete action.

The results could help determine what projects get financed, by both philanthropic groups and issue-oriented companies like Participant, and what form they take. “We desperately need more and more information, to figure out if what we were doing is actually working,” Participant CEO James Berk said.