Strategy
Lay the foundation for strategic storytelling.
Stories that achieve real and meaningful change don’t just materialize—they’re strategically conceived, creatively executed and attached to measurable outcomes.
Your strategy sets you up for success
With a clear view of the audiences your stories will speak to, objectives you can achieve through storytelling, and a narrative framework to guide content creation.
The first step is to identify your audiences and objectives. Strategic storytelling is all about motivating and mobilizing people who can help achieve your goals. You’ll think through who your audiences are, what actions they can take, and why they would—or wouldn’t—take those actions. That strategic thinking puts you in a strong position to create stories that speak to their motivations and address obstacles.
Then, you’ll create a framework of ideas that provide structure and consistency for all of the individual stories you tell.
Audiences and Objectives
Strategic storytelling begins with an understanding of the people you need to motivate and mobilize for your cause. Focus first on the people who have something at stake in the issue and have a real role to play in achieving your goals. Consider them your priority audience.
You’ll think about these questions:
Who needs to take action to achieve your goal?
What actions must they take?
Be as specific as possible in answering these questions. The sharper you focus on the audience you really need to engage, the more likely you are to achieve impact through communications. Your answers will also help you think about specific calls to action to accompany your storytelling.
Next, put yourself in the shoes of your audience. Empathy—the ability to understand other people’s perspectives and feelings—is key to connecting with them in a meaningful way. Think about what might motivate your priority audience to support your cause, and what might stand in their way.
You’ll think about these questions:
Why would they take action?
Why wouldn’t they?
It’s okay if you don’t know off the top of your head. You can gather ideas by talking to people who represent your priority audience. You can search online for market research, public opinion research, and other sources of information about people’s attitudes, beliefs, and feelings around your topic. You’ll want to craft your stories to address these motivations and obstacles.
Example and Exercise
A group of nonprofit organizations launched a campaign to encourage business owners to consider employee ownership (EO) as a business model—in which employees of the business are full or partial owners. Employee ownership offers many benefits to business owners, employees, and their communities. The campaign was called EO=.
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Small-business owners.
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Request a meeting to explore employee ownership for their business.
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Small business owners are motivated to explore better ways to run their business, encourage employees to do their best work, and increase profits. Employee ownership can be a valuable tool to achieve those goals.
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Messaging about employee ownership focused primarily on benefits to the employees, so owners might not see the benefits to the business.
Exercise: In your workbook, write answers to these questions.
Narrative Framework
The exercises will guide you in mapping out a set of ideas using this framework:
People: The people most affected by your work.
Goals: Their aspirations for their lives.
Problems: Obstacles standing between the people you serve and their goals.
Solutions: Specific ways your organization addresses the problem and improves lives.
This might look familiar, because it’s the basic foundation for almost every story: A relatable protagonist sets out to achieve a meaningful goal, encounters challenges, and finds ways to overcome them.
Cognitive science—which studies how people think—has found that people everywhere naturally use this kind of narrative structure to understand the world around them. It can help people wrap their heads around complex issues. It can encourage them to care about your cause, because it puts people in the picture. It’s a simple but powerful tool to help you craft a storytelling strategy that achieves impact.
People
Communication science shows that people are more likely to relate to others who are similar to them in some way — particularly if they share similar aspirations and values. So you want to help your audience see that the people in your stories share hopes, dreams, interests, and concerns that they can relate to. To learn more, see this article on Aspirational Communication from Stanford Social Innovation Review.
In your workbook, you’ll note words that describe people associated with your work. The big idea is to emphasize the positive when putting your people in the picture. This can make the people in your stories relatable to your audience, even if they come from very different backgrounds and circumstances.
For example, a government anti-poverty program describes the people it serves as “hard-working people,” not just “low-income people.” Almost everyone who sees themselves as “hard-working” can relate to the people served by these programs. Message research showed that this approach convinced 7 out of 10 Americans in a national survey to support programs like these.
Example and Exercise
EO= focused on business owners considering their path to retirement—and the people who played a role in building their businesses: “As a small business owner, you're building something you can be proud of, with a great team beside you.”
The exercise prompts you to think about people connected to your cause in different ways—people you serve, people who support the cause, and people within your organization. You might share stories about all of these people, when you’re looking to raise money, recruit volunteers, attract employees, or other objectives. See if you can think of aspirations, values, and personal traits that are common to all of them.
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Small business owners who want to build something they are proud of with a great team of people working for them. EO= chose to concentrate their efforts on these people.
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In the case of EO=, business consultants, including financial advisors and lawyers, support small business people. We used these types of people as spokespeople.
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Organizations who convert businesses to employee ownership are often more concerned with the employees than the business owners. Changing this dynamic was key to success.
Exercise: In your workbook, note answers to the questions above and then consider this question:
What are a few values and traits that might be common among all of the people involved in your cause?
Goals
The people you serve aspire to improve their lives and make the world a better place. Consider the goals people have in relation to your cause. Then describe how the future will look when these goals are achieved. Literally answer the question: What might their lives look like in the future?
This is important, because communication science shows that we are most likely to take action to achieve goals we can picture in our mind’s eye. People are inspired by a clear and positive vision that shows what’s possible if they take action.
Example and Exercise
A The EO= campaign emphasized the benefits of employee ownership for small-business owners:
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EO eases the burdens of sole responsibility from your shoulders and ensures you get a fair reward for your life’s work.
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By sharing ownership and leadership of your business with your employees, you can reward the team that’s helped you build your success and create a culture that encourages their best work.
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Whatever your business goals, employee ownership can help you unlock opportunities that can take your business to the next level, and help it thrive for generations to come.
Exercise: Imagine what people’s lives will look like if the goals are achieved. Write words and phrases that describe the future in vivid terms, which means they evoke images of people, places, things, and actions. Avoid abstract language, which does not evoke images.
For example, a program that serves low-income people describes their goal as “have a good home and provide for their families.” You can picture homes and families. An abstract term for this kind of goal is “financial security.” It’s an important idea, but those words are difficult to visualize.
You can try a visual exercise to get started: Draw a picture that shows what people’s lives will look like when your work is successful. Then you can put words to that vision. In your workbook, write your thoughts in answer to this question:
What goals do people have in relation to your cause?
Problems
Now, you need to describe the problem that stands in the way, and the solution you offer. This helps your audience understand the need for and value of your organization’s work.
The big idea here is to keep it simple. Cognitive science shows that people are most likely to believe, remember, and act upon information and ideas that they understand easily, with minimal mental effort.
Your organization might deal with complex problems, but it’s important to keep the explanation simple so the problem sounds solvable. If the problem seems insurmountable, people may feel the cause is hopeless. Your audience needs to believe change is possible.
There are two important angles to consider when describing problems: People need to understand both the cause and the consequences. Sometimes, we tend to talk about problems at a surface level.
In the case of an anti-poverty program, that might sound like this: “The problem is people are poor.” That’s not a useful problem statement, because it doesn’t speak to the cause or consequences.
A more motivating message about the problem facing low-income people is: “Their jobs don’t pay enough (cause), so their families struggle to make ends meet (consequence). Anti-poverty programs help them learn valuable skills and earn more money.”
Poverty is a complex problem, and anti-poverty programs do many things to address it. But this simple message presents the problem and solution in a simple, straightforward way.
Example and Exercise
EO= focused on root causes and consequences for the campaign’s target audience: Small-business owners are very busy people. Many do not have time or expertise to map a path to a secure retirement. Many small businesses lack tools and training to manage people well and motivate employees to perform at their best, with an eye on the long-term health of the company. So many small-business owners aren’t able to plan ahead and organize their operations to ensure sustained success.
Exercise: In your workbook, write answers to the following questions:
What problem stands between the people you serve and their goals?
What is the cause of this problem? Consider the work your organization actually does
What are the consequences of this problem? In other words, how does it affect people’s lives?
Of course, your organization might address multiple problems. You can tackle more than one in your storytelling. Think of simple ways to describe each key problem and the solution your organization offers to address it.
Solutions
Your solution should connect directly to the problem in a simple, straightforward way, as in the example of the anti-poverty organization: “Their jobs don’t pay enough, so their families struggle to make ends meet . Anti-poverty programs help them learn valuable skills and earn more money.” Keeping it simple helps your audience understand the value of your work, with minimal mental effort.
You should also speak to the benefits of the solution. Describe how your work improves people’s lives in specific, tangible ways. This makes your solution more relatable and valuable to your audience. For even more motivating power, you can also speak to how your work benefits the larger community or society.
For example, anti-poverty programs “offer tools that help low-income people learn valuable skills and earn more money, so they can make ends meet and save for the future (benefits to individuals). This contributes to economic growth that creates more jobs in their communities and the country (benefits to society).”
Example and Exercise
EO= campaign offered employee ownership as a solution to secure the future of small businesses. The campaign showed employee ownership as a multi-purpose tool small-business owners could use to unlock valuable benefits, like retaining employees, raising capital, and selling at a fair price. The campaign also spoke to the value of employee ownership to local communities, which benefit from having more people with an ownership mindset, reliable income, and long-term commitment to the community.
Exercise: In your workbook, answers these questions:
What is your solution to the problem?
How does your solution benefit individuals?
How does your solution benefit the community and/or society?
Pulling It All Together
You’ve thought through a key set of ideas that will motivate your audience to care about your cause and take action.
Next, you’ll select a few ideas to emphasize in a simple framework to guide your storytelling. These are the ideas that you will bring to life again and again in stories about specific people and situations. Consistently communicating ideas that motivate your audience can make your storytelling more impactful—because people need to hear ideas over and over again for you to raise awareness, change attitudes, and take action.
You’ve probably noted a number of ideas that will be useful in your storytelling. For now, try to pick the main ideas that will help your audience quickly wrap their heads around your issue. In the examples below, notice how a few key words work together to make these topics easy to grasp.
Example: Anti-Poverty Program
People: Hardworking people
Goal: Have a good home and provide for their families
Problem: Jobs don’t pay enough, so they struggle to make ends meet
Solution: Tools that help them learn valuable skills and earn more
Example: EO=
People: Small-business owners
Goal: Build a strong, successful business
Problem: Motivating employees and planning for the future can be difficult
Solution: Employee ownership is a multi-purpose tool to unlock many business benefits
Exercise
In your workbook, complete the narrative framework with a few key words that work together.
TIP: You can explore different directions for your framework. Try out a few different versions and see what clicks. You might have one framework for all of the storytelling about your organization’s work, which is helpful for building a strong brand. You might use different versions for different audiences and issues.
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