Narrative Framing as Advocacy
Audiences & Avatars
The most common communication pitfall organizations make is believing their message is for everyone.
We hear from groups all the time that they are trying to communicate with the “general public.” If we can get the word out, the sentiment goes, we can make lasting change.
The sad fact is when you are messaging to everyone, you are really messaging to no one at all.
There are audiences primed to resist your message, no matter how well presented. There are audiences in the messy middle inundated with conflicting information on the truth who may miss your message entirely—drown in the overwhelming noise. There are audiences of would-be allies so steeped in their worldview and jargon they may as well be speaking another language but will align with your cause if your framing is right.
In this section, we look at identifying your audiences, tailoring the right message, moving them to action, and aligning disparate groups around a single vision.
Story Mapping with “YAY’s” & “NAY’s”
At the center of our Narrative Framework tool is a Story Map. It is intended to help you tailor your messaging to your core audience’s interests, passions, motivations, drives, and values. Our story map is divided into four pathways, each with four sections: (1) Audience, (2) Barrier, (3) Appeal, and (4) Action. The purpose of the Map is to make sure that each of your four paths are well-defined and that you can create alignment with all four aimed at the Desired Outcome from your Narrativized Vision that you are working to achieve.
To create tailored messages and the aligned pathways that drive them, we first need to identify our target audiences. Most organizations have no shortage of groups they want to influence to achieve that outcome. To get you thinking about who those groups are, ask yourself, “If I were to host a webinar on this issue right now, what people would I reach out to? Who am I calling or emailing on a regular basis? Who do I feel like I need to connect with?”
When Odd Duck runs workshops based on the Story Map it is not uncommon for organizations to have over a dozen audiences. We are interacting with other groups, coalitions, organizations, and individuals all day to do our jobs. To curate effective stories and get our message out there we need to focus that list down to four core groups. That doesn’t mean you are only talking to them, but for the purposes of your campaign, these are the groups to which you are tailoring content directly. To help narrow things down, think, “Who are the audiences who can help me achieve my Desired Outcome?”
While various groups may be able to take away things from your message, we want to hyper-curate our messages to better reach people. This involves being selective with those audiences. We have included a worksheet below to help you identify and narrow your core audiences.
Once you have identified your core audiences, the next question becomes who are your “YAYs,” and who are your “NAYs.” Your “YAYs” are likely the people you interact with regularly. They are members of coalitions you put together, they always attend your events, they are your cheerleaders.
While we want to develop messaging for your “YAYs,” they are not necessarily who we are strategizing around. That’s not to say that they are not as important, but they are kind of a given. We likely already have a strong alignment with them, so we do not necessarily want to build our core messaging to persuade them to our cause.
Meanwhile, speaking to or meeting with your “NAYs” can feel like talking to a brick wall for a lot of teams. Even when you come prepared with the most refined data or the most eloquent argument, you’re just always met with criticism and dismissal. Sometimes, the “NAYs” already see you coming and assume they know your argument. They often have a motive to reject your argument before they even hear it.
But, the reason we want to track the “NAYs” is two-fold. First, we want to understand their ideological objections, because these arguments may sway some audiences we are trying to reach without a suitable counterpoint. Second, we want to know who influences them. We may not be the right messenger to present the case, but we have access to someone who can reach them.
That way even if we know right out the gate that they will reject our proposal, there are people they listen to. And those people — even if they are not fully aligned with the vision you are trying to create — might be aligned with the issue you are building your framework around.
For example, there are people out there who may not think the same way about abortion access, however they may think similarly about childcare issues. So how do we engage with these individuals, and can we figure out a way to secure agreements in advance thanks to these groups with influence over our “NAYs?”
The Foundation for a Healthy North Dakota (FHND) does incredible work on community health. When political opportunists in the state hijacked messaging to advance anti-vaccine legislation around the state, the usual avenues to make a counterpoint presenting public health messaging were blocked. FHND built some unlikely alliances on the issue. They reached out to the ranching community. Although this group is traditionally conservative, anti-vaccine legislation threatened their livestock and livelihood.
Ranchers joined forces with FHND against these bills. In the end, none of those pieces of legislation got passed.
While we love our “YAYs,” the core of your audience is going to be those in the messy middle — those who are open to arguments and can be swayed. In the end, what action do we want those groups to take?
Addressing that messy middle can be challenging. As the Wyoming Women’s Foundation began developing messaging for its goal of improving investment and access to childcare programs, they had to learn how to alter and direct their messaging from another angle so that it could influence their messy middle.
Focusing on that middle group not only has the potential to pass more policy or access funding in their favor, but it also has a better possibility of influencing the “NAYs.” As it is in the middle, they have likely supported propositions on both sides of the spectrum, meaning they have worked with our “YAYs” as well our “NAYs.” This means that they have not only connections but likely more trust with these groups.
By finding that right perspective to pull those in the middle onto the Wyoming Women’s Foundation’s perspective, perhaps the middle can also find areas to highlight and emphasize when it comes to our “NAYs,” whether business, education, policy, or other areas.
Bias Toward Action
In order to complete our Story Map, once we’ve defined the core audiences, we need to ask what action we need them to take to accomplish our goal. What is it that you want the audience to do? Do you want them to vote a certain way? Do you want them to converse with an elected official or the community itself on behalf of the campaign? Do you want them to share their lived experience? We want to get as focused and as detailed on that action as possible.
This can be anything from showing support for our cause, opposing a bill, mobilizing a demonstration, getting a vaccine, or attending an event. We want to have a clear, focused action that we want to motivate.
Many of the organizations we work with think of a campaign only as a means of getting information out there. If we can get this white paper, campaign brief, report, or content into the right hands, we’ve succeeded. The Story Map asks us to think a little deeper and understand exactly what we want them to do once they have this information.
In the messages you share with your audiences to convince them to take this action, you want to be as detailed as possible, which also includes personalizing your message framing to each group and aligning your action(s) with your vision.
In order to do this, we will first need to identify the barriers that are currently preventing or inhibiting these groups’ ability to do the action. Ideally, we want to be talking to the groups directly to hear firsthand about the challenges they are facing. We then want to turn those barriers into questions that we will try to anticipate and answer to help them overcome those challenges and take action.
Once we have done all of this, we can curate and create stories that will act as a bridge from the challenges to taking action.
Demographics vs. Psychographics: The Avatar Principle in
During the late 1800s, Jennie Churchill (the mother of Winston Churchill) was the “it girl.” Everybody wanted to know her opinion on everything, from fashion to politics. There was one especially close contested race for Prime Minister between candidates William Gladstone and Michael Disraeli. She got to have dinner with both candidates. Afterward, the media came rushing forward, asking her what she thought.
Churchill told the press that when she met with Gladstone she thought he might be one of the cleverest and most interesting men in all of England. But when she met with Disraeli, she told the press, he made her feel like she was the cleverest and most interesting woman in England.
Needless to say, Disraeli ended up winning the election
This story of Churchill encapsulates what we call the Avatar Principle. We want people to see themselves in the messaging and the stories that encourage and embolden them to take action.
Google has trained us all to think in terms of exact demographics — you know the exact age, race, background, income, dislikes, and so on—but the statistical approach of demographics does not paint the full picture of your audience, especially in terms of messaging.
While demographics are important, you need to understand your audience’s motivation. Where are they coming from? Where are they at now? How does this issue affect them, one way or the other? What influences them? Where do they get their media? What are their core values?
We call this psychographics.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Odd Duck was doing a health communications campaign. The public health departments we were working with provided us with all sorts of demographics information on the cities we were working with. They wanted to encourage Black males in the age range 16 to 24 to mask up and honor the shelter in place rules.
The demographics data Odd Duck had been presented with stated very eloquently that their brains just were not fully developed yet. They’re more likely to be risk-takers, so taking precautions against COVID-19 must not be high on their priority list, right?
Odd Duck proceeded to conduct psychographic research and interviews with individuals in this group, and what they found was masking up actually made this group an increased target of law enforcement. Essentially, this group had the choice, “Do I risk contracting COVID-19 or do I risk getting shot by the police?” With this toss-up, COVID-19 does not seem as dangerous.
Equipped with this new information, Odd Duck was able to change our messaging. Instead of focusing on protecting themselves, the messaging became about protecting their friends and family who could be at an increased risk for COVID-19, such as their grandparents.
Personalizing messages is all about understanding the people you are trying to reach and what motivates them. Learning more about the groups we are trying to work with can help us better prepare ourselves and better focus messaging on what our target audiences value more.
Once we understand their motivations, we can try to get as clear as possible, and see if we can turn those barriers into questions. Then those questions can be embedded into the stories that we plan to share so that we can almost anticipate and answer what those reading may be wondering, and before readers can even process those questions as concerns.
As the Alaska Children’s Trust works to improve and increase access to child-serving systems, the organization learned that considering the goals of other groups, such as politicians, could help them better target their audience and find a way to reel in their attention.
They realized that for politicians or those working in policy, focusing on jobs and government efficiency could better pique their interests, while parents and family members might be more interested in the emotional support that their services provide.
Alaska Children’s Trust also found that it would be more effective to focus on the potential positive impacts when reaching out to other organizations, as there may be a sense of competitiveness as multiple sectors that serve children and families have been historically underfunded.
While the messaging appeals to their own interests, such as reducing child abuse and neglect by easing resource access for families, the organization also recognized the importance of a strong, central message that supports improving the entire system, not just the interests of their audiences or Alaska Children’s Trust.
In a similar vein in Idaho, it was very difficult for organizations like the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children to make grounds with legislators because of political agendas and far-right legislators. However, the organization was quickly able to identify areas that could better appeal to those in power: business.
Idaho AEYC noted that there were a lot of big businesses coming into the state, which was really exciting state leaders. However, a big problem that a lot of these organizations were facing was that it was hard to recruit workers because those workers could not find child care.
By identifying this as a common problem for both their organization and businesses in the area, Idaho AEYC was able to identify how they could work together with audiences who may not have given them a listen before. Finding that common problem and then sharing possible solutions as well as reasons why it would help both of them allowed the organization to reach those audiences who the legislators may pay attention to, thus giving more positive influence to their movement.
As Zero to Five Montana looks to establish a child tax credit within their state, they have begun identifying some audiences they want to target, including the faith community. They recognized that audience as someone with a lot of influence over various different people, as well as one that is typically caught in the middle or at least open to new ideas.
Zero to Five Montana identified that within the faith community, there is this sense of looking out for each other and helping those in need. They figured that equipping some of that sentiment in their messaging to those groups would help better reach them and make their communication more effective.
Because the faith community has such a big influence on others, reaching them and getting them to develop a sense of responsibility to help this initiative gain momentum can, in turn, help Zero to Five Montana reach more audiences and push their goals forward.
Speaking the Same Language
Dr. Daniel Siegel is known as the founder of interpersonal neurobiology, which is a multidisciplinary approach to relationships and engagements that draws on research from a wide range of disciplines such as sociology, biology, neuroscience, neurology, and psychology.
In the 1990s, Siegel worked with university professionals from all over the country to map out interactive relationships and their effects on the brain. During a working retreat to discuss the emerging discipline he found what he described as heated debates in emphatic agreements, where people would argue and get very heated even when they are actually in complete agreement. After talking to the parties involved, Siegel learned that each team using their own language and meanings led each other to feel threatened.
So, Siegel stopped the agenda for the retreat and had the participants create a glossary of terms and their synonyms in various studies so that everyone would be able to understand each other. Then they were able to go back to their work and have more productive conversations once they had their new agreed upon language.
You can get work done without coordinating language, however establishing your terms and definitions will help reduce conflict immensely if it’s addressed right out of the gate. Sounds simple enough, but professional spaces tend to get bogged down with a lot of jargon, acronyms and abbreviations. And while a possible slight difference in terms may not seem like a big deal, it can lead to larger problems and confusion later on.
Putting it All Together: Populating Your Narrative Framework
If you recall, in chapter one, we discussed the units of storytelling. Our theory of change is really focused on that outer ring—narrativity. No one book, movie, project, coalition, or campaign is going to change that outer ring on its own. Narratives are composed of many, many different stories. The idea behind the Narrative Framework is to identify the stories we need to curate to disrupt that narrative.
The next two sections are really about applying the Framework and using it to craft and curate compelling stories. So, we want to take a moment to walk through step-by-step where your Narrative Framework should be before we share how to use it.
First, you should have an issue statement that defines the specific problem you want this strategic storytelling campaign to address. It does not have to be a broad overview of the challenge but something to keep you focused on the change you are trying to make.
Second, you should have your Narrativized Vision statement, a hope-centric piece on the world once your campaign is successful. This document is the North Star of your campaign, written in the present tense. It is the world you are working to create.
Your Narrativized Vision should be broken into actionable, achievable milestones. These objectives populate the sections of the Narrative Framework marked Objective and Desired Outcome. Everything that you will chart in your Story Map, the centerpiece of your Narrative Framework, should be informed by your objective(s) leading to your desired outcome.
The Story Map comprises four paths you want your core audiences to take. In the Story Map, you identify those audiences whose actions will help you achieve your Desired Outcome. There will likely be more groups that will influence your outcome, for better or worse, but the core four are the ones you most need to reach to get results.
Next, you want to articulate the actions you want these audiences to take to help you achieve your outcome. This could be any number of things that help you move the campaign forward, but you want to be as specific and focused as possible in identifying them.
Connect with representatives from each audience group for a conversational interview or listening session. Design the questions in advance to focus on their motivations, interests, passions, and values. The language from these conversations will give you insight into the barriers your audience faces and ways to navigate around those barriers. When facing an urgent deadline, this is often the first step that gets cut for time. Don’t short-change the process. Their insights are crucial to informing your map.
Complete the Story Map by identifying the common themes that each group raises as barriers to action. Frame the most pressing barriers as questions.
Build your appeal to each barrier as an answer to the questions posed. Anticipating the challenge and posing a solution before that question is raised is the key to a successful strategic story. This might be the most important part of the mapping process. Pay close attention to the language expressed in the interview and/or listening session. Crafting the appeal in the audience’s own language increases its ability to be received.
Under Position Statement, in the upper right-hand corner of the Narrative Framework, answer why your organization is best equipped to focus on this issue. This is not likely to be shared publicly. Still, when forming coalitions, building alliances, and collaborating with other organizations, it is good for your team to be on the same page and be able to answer why you are driving this work.
Your Core Narrative in the bottom right-hand corner of the Narrative Framework, serves as a collective sum of these moving parts. In this section, you want to weave together your organization’s position, the four paths, your desired outcome, and the Narrativized Vision.
The Narrative Framework is intended to be a cheat sheet highlighting short-hand for the information you are gathering. It is like a logic model for your storytelling efforts. You don’t have to try to cram everything you learn into this one document to inform your campaign. Early in our work, Odd Duck would provide an extensive guide mapping all of our findings to curate stories. Our clients frequently asked for something that could be digested at a glance, especially when onboarding new team members or recruiting allies to a campaign. After several iterations, the Narrative Framework was born. In the sections ahead, we will discuss strategic story curation. How do we get the information reflected in the Framework to translate into stories for social change? How do we recruit the right messenger to deliver the right message in a way that is respectful of their experience and cognizant of their potential trauma? How do we craft compelling stories that influence our audiences by working with storytellers who can speak to their experiences?
The following two sections intend to answer these questions as we shift from Narrative to Story.
