Communication Design For Social Impact. Using Digital Media And Storytelling Practices For Disseminating CSR Activities

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) represents the opportunity to include ethical and environmental issues in a company strategic vision, aiming at creating competitive value on three main assets: economy, society, and environment. Although there are many virtuous companies, which operate not only for increasing profitable outcomes, but also for fostering sustainable development, many CSR activities remain unknown for the wide audience. This is partly due to the fact that promotional and communication strategies are mainly focused on pushing products and services on the market, keeping business vision and brand’s values on a secondary level. Today, design as a discipline is more and more involved into transformative social, economic and environmental scenarios. If, on the one hand, there can be identified many relevant design projects aimed at fostering social wellness, on the other hand, it is likewise fundamental to identify engaging ways for communicating and disseminating best practices, with the goal of expanding the awareness of apparently unrelated audiences towards societal responsibility. Based on the consideration that communicating CSR activities requires a strategic approach, the hypothesis validated through the analysis of the results of a course in Communication Design, advances the idea that storytelling practices on digital media represent an engaging way for establishing a relation between companies and the society. This paper aims at bringing a contribution to the responsibility of communication design towards society, discussing relevant projects in this field and proposing a strategic approach for amplifying CSR activities.