THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Impact Media

Entered in News & Media

Objective

Impact Media is the digital destination for young people shaping the future. We meet our audience where they’re at and give them the resources they need to make a difference, reaching 55M+ people each month.

We aim to create a more equitable and informed world through digital-first content that:

Strategy

We built a passionate team that directly reflects the audience we’re serving, allowing us to deeply tune into culture and create content that genuinely resonates with people. We’re crushing the average for the media industry — our team is predominantly POC, women and nonbinary, LGBTQIA+, and Gen Z. Our lived experiences, in combination with our exceptional ability to create high-quality content, make our work more authentic and powerful.

Our team’s diversity and talent, in combination with our large platform and innovative content creation skills, enables us to create collective change and drive long-term impact.

Execution:

Our two-pronged mission of shifting culture and enabling action is intertwined in a highly synergistic way: a person will consume our content centering an under-heard issue, often involving marginalized communities, and then will be prompted to take action. These actions consist of signing petitions, registering to vote, making donations, participating in protests, joining impactful discussions, sharing content, and more.

Key Features:

  1. We distribute our content on social platforms to make it as accessible as possible. Young people are moving away from traditional forms of media like TV, radio, and articles — we want to meet them where they are. Gen Z consumers are moving toward social media for news more than ever before, as the American Press Institute reports that 74% of Gen Z receive their daily news from social media platforms.
  2. We combine aesthetically pleasing designs, engaging stories, and easy-to-understand language to deliver content that Gen Z wants to engage with. No other platform does our content as well as we do it. Here are a few examples:
    1. https://www.instagram.com/p/C8PvgLuPdxA/?img_index=1
    2. https://www.instagram.com/p/DCmaTpDxe3Z/?img_index=1
    3. https://www.instagram.com/p/DB2GdlDRPC8/?img_index=1
    4. https://www.instagram.com/p/DBM0TIdT3nD/?img_index=1
    5. https://www.instagram.com/p/DArYIE5SdIo/?img_index=1
  3. We stay on top of news, culture, and trends to ensure that our content aligns with what our audience wants to see. Our work often covers stories that young people are talking about, and then educates on the systemic issues that underlie them. Here are a few examples:
    1. https://www.instagram.com/p/DAWUMWoSjGs/?img_index=1
    2. https://www.instagram.com/p/C_9r690xRJQ/?img_index=1
    3. https://www.instagram.com/p/C_ObofESLyC/?img_index=1
    4. https://www.instagram.com/p/C-GLqF9vuKI/?img_index=1
    5. https://www.instagram.com/p/DCw4QBUxUnf/?img_index=1

Results

1) Audience

In the four years since Impact Media was founded, we’ve grown an interactive community of 4 million followers.

Compared to traditional media on Instagram, we are the top-performing platform in organic audience engagement. Impact’s engagement rate is 10x that of accounts like @nowthisnews, @washingtonpost, @npr, etc. In 2024 alone, we garnered a total of 1B impressions and 100 million engagements.

2) Action

The Impact Media team has fundraised $1,717,000+ for social causes and organizations like Planned Parenthood, Everytown for Gun Violence, Ukrainian refugees, and Turkiye/Syria earthquake relief. We find it incredibly important to utilize our content and our community to raise funds for critical moments.

Last year, for example, we raised over $133,000 in relief for those affected by the Maui wildfires. Here are some links to our content during this period:

Impact Media has also garnered 500k+ petition signatures for important social and environmental causes. Additionally, we registered 25K+ young voters before the 2024 presidential election.

 

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Impact Media

Link

Entry Credits