How might purpose lend power, substance and meaning to your message? Why does the story matter? What do you really want to say and to what end? Really plumbing the depths of purpose before anything else will give you more control of your storytelling and its impact.
In reality, there are lots of ‘whys’ — and ‘whats’ — in terms of subject matter, themes, goals and objectives. Why also makes all other questions in story planning, creation and dissemination work a lot harder.
Here’s a few diving-off points. If your answers are the same for more than one, see what happens when you dig deeper.
The intention ‘why’
The results and outcomes you want to achieve by telling the story.
What we want to achieve through our storytelling should intuitively lay the first few bricks of our strategy building, from the farthest-reaching outcomes to the more immediate or practical objectives.
If the aim is positive change (of, say, perceptions, behaviours, policy), then how will that benefit us (lives improved, needs met, imbalances redressed, etc)? Once we factor in people and how they can participate, we’ll find there’s much more to map out.
Not every story has to have a grand ambition. If it touches just one person’s life, it’s worth telling. But there’s no underestimating the effect it could have once set in motion, however small the ripples. Consider what those ripples could be.
The deeper ‘why’
The existential story driving the purpose of your work.
Often the deepest, richest narratives for human change in charity storytelling are those written into your organisational DNA.
The big idea of every story you tell should be anchored in your purpose, beliefs, values and ambitions.
How will purpose or vision speak through the creative themes of your storytelling? How might your stories model the different levels of change you want to bring about? In framing the big issues, how will your ethos be perceived?
Brand strategy and storytelling strategy exist in a dialogue, with each supporting and driving the other. The stronger the foundation narrative, the stronger the stories that build from it.
Not only that. A clear, distinct and inspiring overarching brand or campaign narrative that your teams and wider community feel invested in is a blueprint for participation at all levels. A manifesto for building belief in and living the story you tell.
How will values be expressed through your voice to recruit the right colleagues, partners, members, supporters, funders and so on?
In what ways could your brand narrative become a springboard for internal storytelling that helps shift the dial on team culture, creativity and development?
Dogs for Good: Workshopping the stories of possibility
Dogs for Good is a charity that helps people make life possible through the power of dogs. We worked with them for a number of years, helping them surface, name and live their unique purpose. While doing this we saw how they could deepen their stories, and speak to a range of issues and agendas through them, by using more deliberately the lenses of their brand narrative.
What we did:
In a series of workshops with the comms and fundraising team, we used a classic Kipling’s checklist layered with bigger-picture questions, asking, for example, what ways will this story embody your shared promise, what longer-term possibilities are emerging, or could emerge, from these? We captured a lot of this thinking on workshop sheets for developing story leads and shaping stories.
We also used a number of other techniques, such as storyboarding, reframing, repurposing and headline-writing, to help identify more storylines from their rich cache of case studies.
In a series of workshops with the comms and fundraising team, we used a classic Kipling’s checklist layered with bigger-picture questions, asking, for example: what ways will this story embody your shared promise? or what longer-term possibilities are emerging, or could emerge, from these? . We captured a lot of this thinking on workshop sheets for developing story leads and shaping stories. We also used a range of other techniques, such as storyboarding, reframing and headline writing, to help identify more stories from their rich cache of case studies.
This work is helping the team:
- Shape storytelling themes to have more ways to tell stories for different audiences and outcomes.
- Focus more on the positive outcomes of their work, while involving more voices and perspectives in a more strategic way.
- Use stories about the people and dogs they work with to model their promise, sending their growing community positive signals about the relationship they want to have with them.
Building a culture of storytelling
The team at Dogs for Good have decided to roll out these workshops to engage the wider organisation in storytelling. Not only to boost contribution, but also as a means of fostering understanding, sharing insights and stimulating more collaboration. All crucial for a charity that’s growing and breaking ground in its sector.
The immediate benefit is the wider range of stories they’ll draw out from across teams and volunteers, along with increased opportunities to revisit ongoing projects for story continuity. In the long-term, they’ll engender more trust and confidence in the value and impact of their storytelling strategy.
The backdrop ‘why’
Bringing the bigger picture, and essential context, into view.
What does the landscape around your story look like? What’s the defining mood of the time? Maybe there’s a particular moment that produces a powerful backdrop.
What forces here have given rise to the root problem or unmet need you want to address? And what are the consequences for people who occupy this world? What matters to them?
What detail needs to be drawn out, and therefore carefully researched and rendered as relatable context?
Take war correspondent Marie Colvin’s final dispatch from Homs, Syria. Her vivid depiction of the ‘widows’ basement’ is an enduring example of how to bring the reality of overseas conflict ‘home’ to a global audience.
Once you have a clearer, maybe multi-perspective view of that backdrop, it’ll be easier to find out where your focus lies — and work out how your organisational lens will make sense of the issues.
The central ‘why’
The message, question or choice you want to leave with your audience.
With so much at stake, and indeed so many stakeholders, you may feel pressure to over-burden your story with messages. Opening too many doors — as an old publishing editor once told me — leads our readers nowhere.
Cue the central ‘why’. A kernel of an idea that becomes our storytelling centre of gravity, keeping all other elements in check.
As the key focal point, this ‘why’ will help fuse together the beginning, middle and end of the narrative. It may well reveal the single most important truth, or a unique solution. It could manifest in the actions of a character, as the nub of the challenge, pivotal breakthrough or outcome — delivered by a big emotive theme.
However it permeates the story, it should bestow clarity and precious insight. And ideally leave audiences with an idea thought-provoking enough for it to take flight in their minds.
Your Place: A stronger foundation for purposeful storytelling
A brand story can be much more than a relatable way to talk about groundbreaking work.
In our work with homelessness pioneers Your Place, a new name and narrative grew into a shared language supporting their unique culture and purpose. It also enabled them to humanise and reframe the conversation on homelessness and its real causes.
For the people who rebuild their lives there, Your Place is “a sanctuary, a place with a living, beating heart.. a collective of people who care”, as one resident reflected.
This vision of community was evident in the charity’s daily life, where team members and residents broadly shared the same spaces, goals and philosophy — of ‘solving homelessness, one person at a time’.
The job of the foundational story was to embody this — as a platform for not only personal change, but also social change. In doing so, it provided teams with a clear, versatile framework through which to talk about everything from the individual journeys of residents to staff recruitment and housing policy reform.
The film we made for Your Place tested the scope of the new narrative. Through a simple layering of the ‘whys’, our intention was to hold a mirror to the injustices of homelessness through first-person stories that first challenge our perceptions of the problems — before convincing us of the solutions.
This is part of a guide exploring the four elements of storytelling strategy: Purpose, People, Participation and Platform. This guide is included in our modern storytelling series exploring the next chapter for charity storytelling. You can find out more about this in the introduction or use the ‘next’ button to go to the next section.
Images are credited to Neo and Unsplash.
