Losing money for social value

I was doing some research this morning on the activities of Participant Productions, the firm behind the movies "Good night, and good luck", "Syriana", and others, for my weekly column in a Swiss Sunday newspaper. "Good night" (picture) is about journalist Ed Murrow's fight, in the Fifties, with Senator McCarty. It has been covered with laurels at last year's Venice Film Festival, and has hit American theaters in October (I saw it back then: laurels very much deserved). "Syriana", a thriller speculating on the possible connections between oil trade, secret services and terrorism, started playing more recently. Both of them star George Clooney. Neither of them is showing in Europe yet.
Participant (tagline: "changing the world one story at a time") has been started by Jeff Skoll, one of the founders of eBay (net worth: between 3 and 4 billion USD) and aims at financing projects that can be successful at the box office while also bringing value to the world by inspiring and informing (and possibly prompting action) about issues such as oil, war, corruption, and freedom. I'm not sure that movies can change the world. But it's quite sure that Hollywood's global political and social impact is totally disproportionate to its relatively small size - and I guess that's why Skoll decided to put his money there. I found a story that Bruce Newman wrote in October for the San José Mercury News, and here is a graph worth writing down. Skoll is quoted describing the calculus that Participant does when deciding which projects to support:

One metric of success that we use is whether more good comes from the film than just putting the money directly to work in a non-profit organization involved in the same issue. We've actually had cases where we looked at the risk profile of a film and said, "The way this looks, chances are we're going to lose a million, 2 million, even 5 million dollars. But maybe we'll get 10 million or 20 million worth of social value from it". We will take risks on projects where we think we might lose money, because we hope that the good that comes from that outweighs the risk. It's a different kind of philanthropy.

Comments

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