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"Ultimately, the goal here is to build a brand around social relevance in media." --Jeff Skoll, photographed outside of Participant Productions

In general, serious is hot right now, from up on Brokeback Mountain, to Fahrenheit 9/11, to the muckraking, shoestring documentaries by Robert Greenwald like Outfoxed and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices. Skoll and Strauss hope their success in building an umbrella brand for such films makes it easier for similar projects to get backing at other studios. "Hollywood is pretty risk-averse," Skoll says. "And by taking away some of the financial risk for the studios, we get some of these movies made that might not have been made." In fact, two of their projects, Syriana and North Country, were rescued from turnaround at Warner Bros.

This illustrates yet another principle of social entrepreneurship: finding and working with the right partners. Just as the nonprofits help connect with audiences, major studios like Warner Bros. and Paramount are listed as coproduction companies, sharing costs and development and distribution duties on nearly all of Participant's films. By the same token, Skoll built the company by hiring insiders like Peter Schlessel, formerly of Columbia, and he's worked with fellow forward thinkers like Mark Cuban, another tech billionaire and multifaceted media magnate who owns production companies, distributors, and the Landmark theater chain.

In the end, what makes Participant stand out is more than its do-gooder philosophy. "In my history, especially in the eBay days, I learned how important a brand really can be to the long-term efforts of a company," Skoll says. This may sound like Marketing 101, but it's news to the movie industry. Skoll and Strauss both point out that true brands in Hollywood are few and far between, besides Sundance, Miramax, and, of course, Disney. At a time of slumping movie audiences and increased fragmentation in the media industry, Skoll's vision is to build a company integrated across several platforms--movies, TV, and the Web. "Eventually, I'd like this to be a full-scale media company."

Still, while its vision is clear, "there's a challenge inherent in what we're doing," says Strauss. Picking films that will both be green and make green can be hard. "I don't know if I've ever said this publicly," says Skoll, "but when I started, the very first submission I got was the script for Crash--and I turned it down. I said, 'Hmm, this project has to be done just right, because if it's a little off, it's going to offend a lot of people.'" The film about racial clashes on L.A. highways, of course, went on to score the Best Picture Oscar.

A more fundamental problem facing Participant goes to the heart of its mission: How do you measure social impact? Participant and the nonprofit partners it works with on each film set their own internal goals--the number of emails sent to Congress, say--but these are modest and, frankly, pretty uninspiring compared with the world-changing rhetoric. "Ironically, the most successful campaign, we think, was the campaign we had around North Country, which was our least successful film commercially," says Skoll.

An Inconvenient Truth will be the biggest test to date to see if a film backed by the best possible combination of free media and online organizing can really budge the political consensus. The movie got made because Skoll and Davis Guggenheim, then head of Participant's documentary division, attended a private L.A. presentation of Gore's original slideshow in May 2005. "So after the [presentation], we literally all went off in a room, and I felt it important that his message get out to a bigger audience as quickly as possible, so we agreed on the spot that we'd fund the film, Davis agreed to go off and direct it, and that was it." The film premiered at Sundance just seven months later. "When we did it, I thought it was going to be a charitable initiative and go right on PBS," Skoll says. Without him, it might well have.

There are signs that the film and its barrage of coverage have helped shift the conversation about global warming, all but closing the debate on the underlying science. Yet neither the film nor the Alliance for Climate Protection, a brand-new bipartisan coalition that reaps some of the proceeds, is tied to any particular proposal or bill. That's because, as Gore often says, there's a frustrating gap between what is possible in our current political climate and what it will take to forestall damage to the real climate. The solution will ask a lot more of ordinary citizens than going to see a movie, even a great one.