Impact

DoCC, the Centre for Development of Corporate Citizenship, was the first institution of its kind in India. It connected academic programmes with the social sector and worked towards developing socially aware and responsible citizens. It has included rural India for over 20 years. Students had to intern at different NGOs, submit reports, and share their experiences as part of their educational programme.

We decided to use this and build an intellectual property that would connect corporations, NGOs, CSR funding, think tanks, bureaucrats, and thought leaders across different areas of expertise. An annual magazine was the solution after deliberation.

We decided on Impact as the name, worked out the baseline, and developed the logo, which doubled up as the masthead. We went through the students’ submissions, which included a first impression report, a mid-project report, and the final project report, to select stories that were personal, intimate, and had an impact on everyone. This necessitated a lot of research on the projects, the NGOs, and the subjects that the reports touched upon.

We drew up a content plan to include profiles of NGOs and their principals and highlight what motivated them. This was interspersed with student projects and experiences. The shortlisted projects were then checked for visual possibilities, and the student projects were rewritten as personal experiences because they were that. Templates were to be minimalistic to highlight the content. The headlines and the text were written for maximum impact. We used field pictures taken by the students for that personal touch across the magazine.

Impact was a pilot project, and work has been initiated on the second edition.