THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

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

Special Project

Special Project
From the 8th Annual Shorty Impact Awards

Impact

Winner in News & Media

Bronze Honor in Instagram

Objectives

Impact 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.

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

Strategy and Execution

We built a passionate team that directly reflects the audience we’re serving, allowing us to tune into culture and create content that genuinely resonates with people. We’re crushing the average for the media industry—the Impact team is 95% POC, 85% women & nonbinary, 60% LGBTQIA+, and almost entirely 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.

Implementation:

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.
  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/CtxMHzBvE8r/
    2. https://www.instagram.com/p/CnhO3sKuojH/
    3. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cvhlq84OF7Y/
    4. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm7WSslvSVc/
    5. https://www.instagram.com/p/CniFqIwPaFN/
  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/CnXvX_Hv1rL/
    2. https://www.instagram.com/p/CtPDNvxLkid/
    3. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnk7VWiLR_Q/
    4. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpdf_faP1Kg/
    5. https://www.instagram.com/p/CnIHM-uvBQH/

Results

1) Audience

In the three years since Impact Media was founded, we’ve grown a community of 3.3 million collective followers on @Impact and @Environment.

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, and @npr. In 2023 alone, Impact and Environment have garnered a total of 494 million impressions and 67 million engagements.

2) Action

The Impact 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 utilize our content to raise funds for critical moments.

Most recently, Impact and Environment raised over $133,000 in relief for those affected by the Maui wildfires. Here are some links to our content during this period:

Impact has also garnered 500k+ petition signatures for important social and environmental causes. Additionally, we registered 12,500 young voters before the 2022 U.S. midterm elections.

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Impact Media

Links

Entry Credits