This post is part of a guide exploring four lenses of storytelling strategy: Purpose, People, Participation and Platform.
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So, you have a brilliant story that’ll show the world all about the positive change your charity hopes to make. But what do we want them to do about it? In our drive for wider participation, how can we pass the baton to our audience?
Figuring out what we want people to feel, think and do about our stories can reveal the potential of our storytelling canvas.
You may have noticed my switch in the think-feel-do sequence — that’s because we feel first. The emotional response of our audience comes before any cognitive decision-making. At the same time, if we know what we’re inviting our audience to do, and what emotional investment that requires, we’ll have a better idea of what’ll move them to act.
Taking a fresh look at purpose at this point can help you consider the big objective and how it relates to participation. Ask yourself: What smaller steps are needed to achieve this vision? What are the small acts of commitment?
Sometimes the strategy leads us to make space for others to do the storytelling. Supporting and encouraging a culture of storytelling is precisely what’s needed if we’re to use our stories to show what we can achieve together, for the benefit of all.
Purposeful storytelling shows the audience how they can be part of the solution, whether they’re at the heart of the action or responding to events that matter to them.
Peace Direct: Defining actions from a co-created campaign
Here’s a quick overview of defining the do for a new campaign we co-created with a group of local peacebuilders from all over the world, supported by the team at Peace Direct. The objectives below formed part of a bigger-picture narrative acknowledging these peacebuilders and their peers as storytellers, truth-speakers and changemakers.
- Long-term objective: For local peacebuilders, wherever they are, to lead peacebuilding efforts in their own countries and communities
- Medium-term objective: Build a global movement around a shared manifesto for changes to regional, national and global peacebuilding policy and practice
- Shorter-term objective: Invite local peacebuilders all over the world to tell the real stories of peace, to mobilise the community to show that ‘peace starts here’: the clarion call of our narrative
The audience goal here is to kindle trust and connection — through shared beliefs, goals and experiences. So, as a result, the group’s fellow grassroots peacebuilders feel a sense of being seen, heard and validated by their network. And spurred on by the first few stories of the campaign, they think telling their stories is worthwhile. The reward being the chance to not only influence the deep change they seek, but also to gain support for their own local initiatives.
WWF: Putting the future of Brazil's rainforests in our hands
From our work, we’ve seen that spending more time on the strategy of a story returns greater results. Save the Cerrado, for WWF, is one of those stories.
The big-picture ‘why’ was to avoid the destruction of an expanse of South American rainforest as vital as the Amazon — by switching people on to the need for responsibly sourced soy. But how did the story get people to care enough about a place 6,000 miles away to lobby their supermarkets?
We brought the rainforest to them. And with it, the impact of our unwitting consumption (of meat embedded with soy from animal feed) on our natural environment — without blame. With a hand-shadow artist portraying wildlife living there, the 60-second animation told a visual story of how the future of the Cerrado was in our hands.
It worked: one major UK supermarket chain changed its stocking policy, setting a precedent for others. It did so by showing people they had a powerful part to play — not just as consumers, but also as citizens.
The plan was laser-focused from the ‘why’ and the ‘who’ right through to the ‘how’. And it began with understanding people and the connection points: our strong relation to ‘home’, our personal actions, our shared responsiveness to injustice. To distil it down, this story equipped its audience with knowledge and demonstrated that each of us, far from hopeless, has the decision-making power to collectively change the world.
This post is part of a guide exploring four lenses 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.
