Pitch for Change: Scripting for Television With the SDGs Curriculum Integration Ideas for Media Courses

The Value of Curriculum Integration

By incorporating Truth and Reconciliation, equity, diversity and inclusion, and sustainability principles, media courses help students build the knowledge and skills needed to produce responsible, informed, and impactful work after graduation. They also provide space to amplify diverse voices and support the development of professionals who contribute to a respectful, equitable, and sustainable media ecosystem.

Setting the Context

Roadmap Goal: “Create an advocacy campaign around a specific Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), utilizing social media platforms and other distribution channels.”

This advocacy campaign, a “Pitch for Change,” uses a media storytelling approach to help students create meaningful media projects that also address real-world issues. Through researching an SDG of their choice, students will be able to reflect on what is important to them and also share their learnings on an SDG with their classmates. This encourages them to combine creative storytelling with research and data and think strategically about audience and impact. The project also provides a way to assess students’ ability to communicate persuasively and connect learning to social and global contexts, which aligns with Seneca's initiative to integrate sustainability into program and course curricula.

Activity Overview

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outline global priorities for creating a more sustainable and just world. They are also helpful in expanding students’ understanding of sustainability as a broad, interconnected set of concepts, and not just comprised of the first things that might come to mind (e.g., recycling, etc.). In this assignment or exercise, students will research a specific SDG and develop an original media concept for a written pitch for a short-form TV or web segment. The piece should clearly communicate the concept, target audience, and key data points that make the idea persuasive and impactful, and it should include at least one element that inspires action in the audience.

Activity Objectives

1. Apply research and data to develop a persuasive pitch advocating for a UN SDG of your choice.
2. Communicate a clear media concept by creating a pitch for a short TV or online segment.

Sample Instructions

1. Create a short pitch for a short TV or online segment that promotes one United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG).
2. Pick one SDG and select a specific target that this pitch can support to advance this goal."
3. Research at least two credible statistics to support your idea and note the sources.
4. Decide who your target audience is and where the segment would appear (for example, YouTube Shorts, local TV, etc.).
5. Develop a working title, a brief description of the concept, and a clear call to action . Use the language of the goal's target if relevant.
6. Present your pitch in your choice of modality (brief video, one-page written summary, 3-5 slide deck, etc.). Make sure to include your audience, platform, data points, and call to action.
7. Finally, write a reflection on why you chose the topic, how you used data, and what you learned about pitching advocacy content.

Sample Pitch #1: Pay Gap Cafe

SDG 5: Gender Equality

SDG Target 5.c: Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels.

Concept: A hidden-camera style segment follows customers in a coffee shop where men are charged full price and women automatically receive a discount to reflect the gender pay gap. Short interviews capture real-time reactions and spark conversation about workplace equity.

Audience & Platform: College students and young professionals on Instagram Stories and campus digital screens.

Key Data Points:

• Women globally earn only 77 cents for every dollar men earn (UN Women, 2023).
• At the current pace, it will take 169 years to close the gender gap (World Economic Forum, 2023).

Call to Action: Direct viewers to advocacy campaigns urging companies to publish pay equity data.

Sample Pitch #2: Invisible Water

SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

Target 6.4: “By 2030, substantially increase water-use efficiency across all sectors and ensure sustainable withdrawals and supply of freshwater to address water scarcity and substantially reduce the number of people suffering from water scarcity.”

Concept: A fast-paced, short-form news segment exposes how everyday consumer choices in high-income countries contribute to global water scarcity. Using comedic commentary and quick on-screen graphics, the host highlights how “invisible water” in products like jeans and coffee drains global resources.

Audience & Platform: Young adults on TikTok and Instagram Reels, ages 18–30.

Key Data Points:

• Over 2.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water (UN, 2023).
• A single pair of jeans requires 7,500 liters of water to produce (WWF, 2023).

Call to Action: Viewers are encouraged to reduce “water-heavy” purchases and support certified sustainable brands.

Debrief and Reflection

Encourage students to share their pitches in small groups and highlight the strengths and areas of possible improvement for each. Guiding questions could include:

• What made the pitch compelling and/or persuasive?
• How effective was the voice, tone and impact of the pitch?
• What factors might be considered when bringing this pitch to life?
• How might this pitch raise awareness or advocacy on its intended topic?

Summary

This activity allows students to explore a UN Sustainable Development Goal through media storytelling. It encourages students to research and incorporate credible data to support their ideas, and it also supports development of social justice beliefs as students have the freedom to choose an SDG that is meaningful to them. The project also prompts reflection on how media can raise awareness and ultimately inspire action.