In today’s overcrowded media marketplace, nonprofits and values-based businesses struggle to achieve a shared communication goal — changing minds, the challenge of moving beyond creating awareness to motivating action. Thankfully, effective storytelling techniques are now recognized (and documented) as a shared solution to this increasing challenge. Today, you can either learn to tell stories that inspire people to act and share, or you can get immediately forgotten. Let’s look at the current state of storytelling as a tool for positive change.

What is the Challenge?

If you’re in the public interest sector seeking donations or behavior change, you may want to cut through competing messages and change minds about the best use of donation money or volunteer time. If you’re a manufacturer or business services company, you’re seeking to attract attention so you can change minds about the best sustainably produced product or service to meet customers’ needs. In either case, supporting facts, data, and statistics are boring to listen to and easy to forget – they don’t move people. Your added challenge is you want to change minds, but people cannot face facts if there’s a conflict with their mental frame or point of view.

Why Is Storytelling So Powerful?

It’s not really news that we humans are hard-wired for narrative; it’s just a truth receiving more attention lately as information overload surges on the Internet. Since we first began talking to each other, telling stories has been an effective way to capture attention, engage an audience, and motivate them to act.

  • Fritz Heider & Marianne Simmel created a one-minute video in 1944 for a landmark study. Watch the video yourself and scribble down a few notes telling what you see.

What Makes a Good Story?

Robert McKee, Andy Goodman, Ira Glass, and yes, even the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (!!), suggest that to have impact, a good story will exhibit certain characteristics. A good story is:

  • Concise, but colorful with telling details (2-3 minutes)
  • Told in the language of the audience
  • Not predictable (full of challenges/obstacles/barriers)
  • Engages the emotions
  • Contains a truth of human nature — answers why do I care?
  • Infused with meaning/ Conveys a complete idea

Where Do Beginning Storytellers Start?

It isn’t that facts (or product features) have no place in your messages; but you want to begin by trying to construct your messages in a narrative format and gently weaving in a few facts here and there. Save most of your facts and statistics for support after your story is finished and your audience is emotionally engaged and ready to act. In a future blog post we will dive deep into the specific how-to steps of building a story and writing the telling details that bring it to life to change minds.

Resources

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, by Jonathan Gottschall

[non-affiliate link]

Storytelling as Best Practice, by Andy Goodman [VIDEO presentation, booklet now out of print]

Storytelling That Moves People, by Bronwyn Fryer, Robert McKee [Harvard Business Review, pdf]

Resonate: Present visual stories that transform audiences, by Nancy Duarte [non-affiliate link]

How Not to Convince People to Go Green: Throw More Facts At Them (Simran Sethi on TEDx Cibeles Video, via Treehugger)

Ira Glass on Storytelling, four-part video series [You Tube]

To Improve Health and Health Care, Vol. 14: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Anthology [non-affiliate link]