Key Lesson What’s Your Story’s Purpose?

You know that storytelling is a great way to educate, inspire and engage people. While your Narrative Framework provides big picture ideas about your organization’s cause, storytelling can motivate and mobilize audiences to support your specific cause.

While some audiences will be aware of your cause and care about it, they may not understand the problem and the solution. Others may understand, but not feel a sense of urgency to act. Developing the right storytelling objectives will help you produce stories to meet your audiences wherever they currently are—and move them along the path from awareness to action.

There are six key questions you should consider before moving to sketching your story.

1. You will need to determine which audiences need to see your story most. Who is helping to overcome the problem that your story addresses?

Describe up to six distinct groups

Tip: Consider completing the Audience and Objectives Lesson before you move forward.

Tip: To raise awareness, communications must capture the audience’s interest or imagination of your audience, so they will pay attention.

Tip: Surprising the audience is a powerful way to begin, because the brain is wired to focus on new stimuli. Tell people something meaningful they didn’t know: try to find the single, most powerful fact, statistic or idea that helps people see the situation in a new way.

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Small Lauren Girardin

Unless people care about your cause, they won’t bother to stop and think about it-much less be moved to act.

Tip: Putting people in the picture is perhaps the most powerful technique, because it creates a human connection that can activate aspirational ideas and emotional reactions.

Tip: Begin each story with a message or image about the people affected by your work that encourages the audience to like and respect them. Ideally, the audience should see themselves—or people they aspire to be—in the story.

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Small Marjan Safinia

Our audience must understand the situation intuitively, which means they can process it immediately. People are more likely to believe information they readily understand.

Tip: You can craft a narrative that explains just about anything, in just about a minute. To build understanding of your cause, focus on the most noticeable and important aspect of the problem—and connect it directly to the most relevant part of the solution.

Tip: It’s smart to dumb things down. Avoid overloading people with too much information—it actually demotivates them.

Tip: Stories about people overcoming obstacles and achieving goals can illustrate a complex problem and solution in understandable, human terms—and show that change is possible. Find the best story that creates instant comprehension and emotional connection.

Every communication intended to motivate behavior must create a call to action that moves people to act immediately. People are bombarded with appeals for their time, energy and money. If they don’t act when we have their attention, we’re likely to lose them. We have to spur them to action by creating a sense of urgency.

Tip: Getting people to act is the toughest part of the process. People may care about the cause, but face emotional or practical obstacles to action. You’ll need to explore exactly what those obstacles are—and find ways to overcome them.

Tip: An effective call to action will create an emotional reaction. A sense of urgency may be evoked through negative and positive emotional appeals: People may respond in reaction to pity, anger or fear. They may react to the exciting possibility of grasping an opportunity—right now—to do something positive. Explore various emotions that create a sense of urgency or possibility.

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Small John Haydon

The specific actions we ask people to take must be meaningful in advancing the cause, but simple for the person to do. When possible, they should be fun and interesting, as well.

Tip: Actions take many forms. We can ask people to “learn more” by downloading information or viewing a video. “Spread the word” by sharing information with their social networks. “Speak out” by signing a petition or writing a blog post. “Get connected” by meeting others with similar values and interests. Different people like to do different things—you’ll need to find out what actions people are interested in taking.

Greenpeace Mobilisation Lab's Campaign to Free the Arctic 30 Infusing storytelling into advocacy campaigns.
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Small Mob Lab Team

You're almost there.

Make sure you know your story's purpose before crafting one.

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Nice Job!

You've outlined objectives for your story to meet your audiences where they are and move them to action. You could consider sketching a compelling story arc next.

Next up: Stories About Impact