Narrative Framing as Advocacy
How to Tell a Story
When planning to incorporate story into a campaign, most organizations want to start here.
Many already grasp communication strategy, messaging, and audience engagement—though not necessarily in the way we encourage—and consider storytelling the garnish to sprinkle on their plate. Hopefully, we have made a compelling argument for why storytelling should be strategically incorporated into an advocacy approach from the very beginning.
The early sections are for your organization to understand what stories it needs to tell; this last section is dedicated to how to tell them.
Storytelling is like Sculpting Smoke
Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, says, “a story is the simplest way of presenting a complex world.”
A well-told story offers your audience a way to easily gain an understanding of some feature of the world that you, as a storyteller, have surfaced. However, expressing it in the simplest way is not always the simplest task.
Crafting a story, Roy explains, “is like sculpting smoke. Smoke comes out, but then, of course, it is given form and shape and structure.”
As storytellers, especially those working to articulate a change, we may have a lot of smoke—facts, history, people, stats, actions, and emotions—all floating through our heads and at our ready disposal. We can share all of those things, but if we don’t do some work to edit them, they can become an overwhelming mess.
Rather than becoming a compelling narrative, that dump of information becomes so much like smoke that it will drift over the heads of our audience. This is one of the biggest mistakes organizations make in advocating change. They try to share everything.
Storytelling is not just about the content driving the message you’re curating. It is also about the shape: the specific facts, stats, people, actions, and emotions you share. Editing is what truly allows a story to be effective.
When do personal details become TMI? At what point do statistics shift from illuminating a solution to overwhelming our listeners? What emotion do I want my audience to feel after receiving this story? What is the key lesson I wish to convey, and how should I convey it?
This is where our Avatar Principle can come in handy. Not only do we want our audience to see themselves in our stories, but we also want to experience our stories the way our audience receives them—before they go out into the world.
Putting a Face to the Story
Working in policy, it can be easy to throw data at our audiences and expect them to pick up on the trends and see the evidence. Unfortunately, as we saw with the Housing First project cited earlier, numbers don’t have the same emotional connection as real stories.
For the Oklahoma Partnership for School Readiness, that meant turning those numbers into reflections of real people as they work to re-establish childcare subsidies for childcare workers. Rather than giving data about how much money workers would lose because of new legislation, they decided to personify it and put a face behind who this would affect.
To address the impending loss of critical benefits for child care workers, our organization launched a public awareness campaign focused on the issue of categorical eligibility. By crafting narrative frameworks that illustrated the real-world consequences of these losses on individual workers and families, we enabled stakeholders to better understand the tangible impacts. This approach not only humanized the issue but also empowered stakeholders to use their voices to advocate for effective policy solutions.
As a result, the campaign sparked widespread public concern, fostering enhanced dialogue between stakeholders and policymakers and paving the way for more informed and compassionate policy discussions.
Additionally, they can include personal details, such as hobbies, interests, and family life, that tug at the heartstrings of the audience to make the character a more fully realized human being and, therefore, even more relatable.
While the data is a huge part of that example, the story is what really drives it home. Using a character allows that data to become more easily consumable and takes their messaging to the next level.
Escalation is Key to Getting Audience Buy-in
In the words of author George Saunders, the pen behind Lincoln in the Bardo, “What turns an anecdote into a story is escalation.”
What he means is that we always want to ensure our audience understands that the story we are telling has true stakes.
If you think of the classic story structure we learned in school, there’s a large sloping hill where all the moments lead up to the climax, followed by a resolution, which slopes back down to the baseline.
As we’ve discussed previously, while not all stories may have this shape, we need to be able to stand back and look at our story to find spots where we can escalate and gather momentum.
Musical artists have some of the best abilities to escalate with their songwriting. In Taylor Swift’s song “No Body No Crime,” we’re drawn in with the possibility of conflict after we learn that a character named Este is cheating on her husband. Then we find out, only a verse later, that Este is missing and her husband is the suspect. Shortly after that, we learn that the narrator may be plotting revenge.
In the end, it’s the narrator who comes out on top.
But really, it’s Swift who came out on top because we just listened to her song all the way through, hooked.
She didn’t have to tell us the full story; she just gave us glimpses and careful phrasing. That was enough to keep our attention and keep us listening, interested in seeing where it all plays out.
Our story, like a sculpture in smoke, should pace the information it reveals carefully and methodically, presenting one detail after the next.
Show, Don’t Tell
A storytelling mantra you’re probably already aware of is “Show, don’t tell.”
If you want to pique your audience’s interest, there is no better tool than showing them something specific.
If we were to tell you there’s a man sitting on a park bench, there’s no story there.
If instead, we show you the retired detective, hunched alone on the bench, fiddling with the tie too tight on his neck as he takes a sip, discretely, out of a paper bag, then another… That’s when a world of narrative questions and possibilities begin to open up.
Detail is what allows a story to take root. Francine Prose, a writer and teacher, says, “Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth … It’s the single priceless detail that jumps out of the story and tells us to take it easy, we can quit our adult jobs of playing judge and jury and again become as trusting children.”
As storytellers, a large part of what we do depends on the trust of our audience. For instance, in the TV show The Bear, the character Carmy comes back to Chicago after working in what is considered to be one of the best restaurants in the world, and sets out to apply his fine dining philosophy to his deceased brother’s no-nonsense beef sandwich spot.
In a review for the now-critically acclaimed show, Genevieve Yam, who worked for years in fine dining, wrote for Bon Appétit, “What The Bear did was peel back the curtain on the painful reality of what it’s like to work in a kitchen, and the emotional and physical cost that comes with it.”
The Bear earned Yam’s trust through the use of authentic details, which is what gets audiences to stick around. All these specific details contribute to our sense of the restaurant world that these characters inhabit and also to our sense of the characters themselves.
As Prose says, “A well-chosen detail can tell us more about a character—his social and economic status, his hopes and dreams, his vision of himself— than a long explanatory passage.”
We can apply these same reveals to the stories we curate to make change. As communicators, advocates, and change-makers, we often not only want to share everything but feel compelled to share everything now. We want to put those facts, history, people, stats, actions, and emotions forward as quickly as possible, but if we balance the urgency pushing the change we want to make with the pace in which our audience best receives information through story, we are likely to get better results.
Real People Are Never Just Their Problems
Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans, discusses the necessity of empathy in good storytelling. If we are telling stories about real people living real lives, we need to respect the richness of those lives and fully empathize with them. This is even more important if the stories we tell involve significant trauma; we don’t want to flatten people’s diverse experiences so that a single traumatic event defines their lives.
One way to successfully practice empathy in our storytelling is to utilize what social entrepreneur Trabian Shorters calls asset framing, which seeks to define people by their aspirations first rather than their challenges or perceived deficiencies.
Communications expert Chandra Harris-McCray also suggests reframing your position from that of a storyteller to that of a story sharer who doesn’t own someone else’s experience but rather bears a responsibility towards them.
The show Reservation Dogs is a great example of storytelling that feels more like story-sharing. As one critic notes, “the way Reservation Dogs depicts struggles specific to Indigenous communities, couched in narratives focused on community love and healing, feels singular in a TV and movie landscape that tends to exploit trauma.”
Yes, the show deals with significant trauma, such as casual white supremacists, suicide, and the abuse at Native American boarding schools, but crucially its vision of life in the Muscogee Nation is not limited to these traumas.
Instead, the show depicts a great deal of tender care and love in the community. The story is primarily concerned with the very specific young people at its center, who each have their own individual dreams and aspirations.
The show is not only empathetic but also utilizes the other tools we talked about. It includes authentic details, escalates when possible, and comes from a human-first perspective.
Overt branding, a show of numbers, or an inauthentic story do not truly inspire people to create real change. It’s compassion and a clear willingness to listen that make people feel heard and encourage them to work with organizations like yours.
Odd Duck once hosted a storytelling training for homelessness prevention advocates in the Pacific Northwest. A young woman, an outreach worker in the homeless encampments there who had once been homeless herself, protested that her organization’s every effort to use storytelling in advocacy work fell flat. It all felt stale and contrived.
She was prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The policy and communication teams responsible were a bit hurt and understandably defensive.
We decided to workshop some of their materials as a group—a mix of newsletters, fundraising appeals, and advocacy briefs—to see if we could diagnose the problem together (mostly to keep a fight from breaking out). Each story followed a similar arc, introducing the story holder, discussing the challenges of their life on the street, and detailing the interventions offered by the organization that helped turn their situation around.
They were strong, well-written pieces, interspersing the vignettes with statistics detailing the larger issue, trends throughout the county impacting homelessness, and program descriptions with achieved outcomes.
But the outreach worker was right. They were also a little stale and a bit contrived.
Over the next 45 minutes, it was revealed that the outreach worker had deep, personal relationships with everyone in the profile.
She knew that Charlie played chess in the park, had once been a high school champion before falling on hard times, splurged on a new set once he got housed, and hoped to teach his son after his living situation got sorted.
She knew Angela liked to make origami animals from discarded paper, which she used to decorate her tent. A small menagerie of forest creatures hung from the ceiling by a cat’s cradle of twine. She often gifted unicorns and deer to neighbors beneath the bridge she called home.
She knew Patrick was obsessed with the Seattle Seahawks. Trinity was an avid reader who maintained her library card and was reading her way through the classics. Cynthia had lived in nearly two dozen cities throughout the country before settling there.
These pieces hadn’t reflected these incredibly beautiful, profoundly human details. The communications team agreed to start trying to incorporate them.
A few months after the training, we received an email from the outreach worker. Not only had comms made good on their promise, which everyone, including their donors, agreed enhanced the quality of their stories, but they had instituted a policy for team members to go out in the field every couple of months to experience the work in the camps firsthand.
Resources
For examples on good storytelling and how to reach the heart of your audience, you can check out these two advertisements by Merck on the HPV vaccine: “The Side Hug and The Dad Cab” and “Get Out of My Face.”
When it comes to storytelling through song- writing, Taylor Swift has it down pat. Her song “no body, no crime” is like a book in a song.
Assignments
- Finalize a completed draft of your own Narrative Framework. Think about how you want to target your different audiences to get your message across, and how you can get the ball rolling. If you don’t have all the information to populate the Frame, please leave sections blank — you can always come back to it and make changes.
- Once your draft is completed, create a working plan for how to put your Narrative Framework into action. Now we want to start thinking about a possible timeline and how realistic we can get with our strategies. While it is important to not get too overwhelmed, also try to be optimistic! Positive thinking and strategy goes a long way.
