CoSTAR Workshop: Social Impact by Design FOR CREATIVE BUSINESSES
CoSTAR Workshop
Social Impact by Design for Creative Businesses: Driving a competitive edge through social impact
28 to 29 October 2025
A 2 day workshop with The Impact Collective for creative organisations based in Sheridans, 76 Wardour Street, W1F 0UR.
Workshop Overview
Are you a creative business looking to clearly address key challenges to meeting your sustainability and social impact goals? Do you need an action plan with tangible steps to make your top ideas a reality?
Creative industry businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of incorporating social impact approaches into their business and creative development processes.
What is often harder for companies, is knowing how to develop long term strategies and how to articulate the substantial non-economic value generated by their creative output in society as a whole. This opens up a new and very different business model for creative businesses. Economic success is essential, but it only tells one side of the story and explores only one line of opportunity, within a creative business.
Who is the workshop for?
To ensure you get the most out of the experience, we are looking for creative organisations who are already working towards social impact and sustainability goals and are keen to unblock and accelerate progress, deepen their impact, and make clear plans for the next 3-12 months.
You will need to be available in late-October for two full days in person in central London and to complete a small amount of pre-work in advance of the sprint.
What will you come away with?
By the end of the two-day sprint, you should have:
Clearly articulated challenges to be addressed to meet your sustainability and social impact goals
A broad long-list of creative ideas for addressing these challenges
A prioritised shortlist of more developed ideas for addressing prioritised challenges, including impact success measures
A clear action plan with tangible steps to make top ideas a reality
Experience of using a number of design thinking tools for breaking down and tackling future goals
Workshop format
The workshop will be centred on a series of interactive and collaborative exercises, where you will work together with other participants to refine and develop your ideas, learning from each others’ experience and benefiting from the diverse perspectives in the room.
We will broadly follow the double-diamond design process:
Discover: Deeply understanding the problem by exploring the specific blockers between organisations and their sustainability and social impact goals, digging into how they are experienced and their root causes, and any common themes across the group.
Define: Collaboratively prioritising the most impactful challenges for each organisation to address, articulating clear problem statements to be solved for each.
Develop: Creative ideation to surface opportunities to solve these challenges, followed by collaborative iterative idea development to refine possible solutions and create light impact frameworks to ensure success.
Deliver: Prioritisation and action planning, so everyone leaves the workshop with a tangible set of steps to test their ideas and then implement them, alongside impact success measures.
To help you get the most out of the two days, there will also be some light pre-work, ensuring you are able to come well prepared with specific social impact and sustainability goals, some wider perspectives from within your organisation, and some inspiration from other impactful organisations.
Application Criteria:
The programme is open to
enterprises and legal entities registered and trading in the UK.
be from or support the screen and/or performance sectors.
have an operations and/or project team based in the UK.
How to apply to join our "Social Impact by Design for Creative Businesses: Driving a competitive edge through social impact" workshop
Please complete our simple application form below before our deadline of 24 October 2025:
An Access Bursary is available to support participation, in line with our Social Impact Plan, for eligible individuals who may face additional barriers to participation. Find out more.