Step two
Audience
Stories need people to bring them to life and to share them. To make pro-civil society narratives salient, our strategy needs to elevate the voices and actions of people who share our values. Crucially, we also need to make sure that those stories reach people.
Strategy
To change the narrative, you have to be the narrative.
While we want to change the minds of people who do not yet agree with us, we also need people to reach that “middle ground” for us. Narratives become strong through constant repetition, so an important part of narrative communications strategy is mobilizing the people who share our values to be more vocal and talk about them more.
When we lack resources to invest in massive advertising campaigns, we can turn to our strongest resources: people and their passion for core human values like community, empathy and resistance.
To tell the story of civil society we need to focus on the people who are civil society. This step shows how you can elevate the stories that you want to become the new narrative around civil society, to replace any negative, anti-activist narratives that hinder your work.
This part of the strategy is about how you can engage potential supporters to create stories that feed your narrative, and also to share those stories so that more people see and talk about them. This is how narratives grow. We want people to tell our story—and to be our story.
We want to make civil society something they can get behind and feel a sense of belonging to. For that, they need to see vivid, relatable stories.
We wanted to mobilize Salvadorians who shared our values and were active but not on this issue.
Tactics
Branded channels
How do we get more people to see stories that show civil society at its best? If today we find that stories of conflict and crisis are easier to share and get media coverage for, we need to experiment with new approaches and find ways to make people excited about the stories we want to tell. Another challenge we faced was that it was hard for activists and civil society groups to speak out about the threats they faced, because it might make them a direct target for repression.
To get around these twin challenges of reach and threats, we wanted to create and grow a brand new channel that would work solely on behalf of the civil society story. It would focus solely on telling the story of civil society described by activists in our workshops and documented by our storytelling partners. It would also take the pressure for telling this story off the shoulders of activists, but be there to promote them and their messages when they need their voice heard. It would also be a platform to test what kinds of stories work best with different audiences, and then run advertisements to reach those audiences in larger numbers.
Strategy
Comunidad x El Salvador
We wanted to build a brand that would speak directly to potential supporters of civil society. The brand would exist solely as a social media platform: a place to get the stories out there—that basic first step of narrative work. If the stories that make up our narrative are not out there, then it will never be something people think or know. Our message will never become “common sense.”
We built the brand around the ideas expressed by activists in workshops, naming the channel “Comunidad x El Salvador.” Drawing on the way activists talked about what civil society meant to them, we used bright, hopeful colors and people-centered imagery.
How we targeted a pro-civil society audience
We began with the most straightforward audience challenge: how to find the most effective way to excite the people who share our values but are not actively supporting the cause of civil society? This is a far bigger group than you might think: Very often, people who are part of civil society have never even heard the term! Remember, for our goal of making our narrative more salient, our search is for the people most likely to share our stories.
To find our target audience we started with analyzing public opinion surveys created by Instituto Universitario de Opinión Pública and the people who engaged most with Alharaca stories: women 25-34 in urban areas like the capital city San Salvador. We then deepened our profile by identifying basic affinities: other things that our audience might like. This allows us to target advertisements to this audience segment on Facebook.
Here are some of the affinities we used to create a persona to test with: organizations (e.g., Amnesty International), political positions (like progressive politics), political figures (like Michelle Obama), newspapers and magazines (like The Guardian), cultural figures including musicians or artists (like Ai Weiwei).
For example, we built our audience persona using the following affinities: feminist philosophy, social issues, international humanitarian law, social movements, Natalia Lafourcade, activism, the United Nations, Florence and the Machine, the Beatles, bossa nova, Kendrick Lamar, social change, pop rock and human rights.
To get started quickly with Facebook ads, you could use these affinities as a base too, perhaps adding figures, media and organizations relevant in your part of the world.
- Build brand around the words and imagery used by activists in your messaging workshop, using the colors of the Salvadorian flag for the logo and design.
- Create a Facebook and Instagram channel (others depending on your audience and country).
- Start posting some organic content so that your channel is alive.
- Create an audience persona on Facebook Business Manager.
- Start running A/B tests—see below.
- After a month of building up the channel, share the channel with your networks asking them to engage and promote.
- Tip! Sometimes overtly political Facebook ads get taken down. This is where more values-based content has an advantage because it gets our message across without being seen as political, both by the algorithm and by apolitical audiences!
The best way to build your narrative brand is to co-create it with your narrative leaders, drawing on the imagery they come up with for your logo and look and feel.
You can then start running A/B tests to test every aspect of the brand: colors, logo, words, slogans, etc. These results might vary depending on the audiences and context of the ads. We are sharing them to illustrate how you can test and refine every aspect of your content to maximize its effectiveness. This is how we “make popular what needs to be said” and get people to engage with our stories.
Some of the simple ways you can refine your brand:
- Logos / icons – we found that having the “scales of justice” worked better than not having them in rule of law messages.
- Basic post structure – we found our posts worked better when we started them with a general values message about civil society, and then told the actual story in the picture or link.
- Basic wording – we were surprised to learn that actually saying “civil society” tended to work better than using less jargon-y synonyms like “community groups.”
Tip! Throughout your workshops and campaign, keep a shared logbook of things you want to test. For example, if people disagree about a hashtag or you fear an image will not make sense—don’t argue with colleagues about it: Test it!
What metaphor best explains the law?
Judges as referees who keep our families well and safe vs. who fight corruption and impunity.
How to
Find, understand, reach and elevate your audience
The starting point is in your messaging workshop with your movement and partners. When you carry out your Instagram story exercise, the people in the story are already one target audience. They are the people you need to bring your story to life. In your workshop, take some time to think more about who that audience is. Draw them and think about their interests, their values, their hopes and aspirations. You can use this worksheet.
In social media terms, affinities are the shared interests of groups of people. Quite simply, we want to know what other things people who care about social media are interested in. If we know this, we can reach them with social media advertising. But we can also find new ways to get them thinking about our core values without talking in an overtly political way: in other words, through cultural interests.
For example, fans of the reality TV show Duck Hunters are highly likely to be supporters of the politician Donald Trump. If you want to find out what the affinities of your potential supporters are you can find them from the affinity scores of the Facebook pages of organizations in your network. If you already have access to supporters, you could also send them a survey asking them about some of your core values and then also ask about some of their other interests and hobbies.
Social listening traces the tone, content and volume of conversations that are taking place on social media. You can use them to measure the salience of narratives, find ways to grow them and then measure whether the conversation has shifted after your intervention. It is a crucial tool for understanding your supporters and audiences. For example, you can analyze the conversations around civil society. Let’s say 10% of the conversations involve people saying positive things about activism. You want to grow that. Social listening now has given you a baseline to track, but it also shows you who the people are contributing to that 10% of conversation and what kind of positive things they are saying.
Alternatively, you can see if your narrative is already out there in conversations. Crucially, you can “train” your social listening tool to recognize certain phrases or expressions in order to recognize your narrative in daily speech. Or you can start with your target audience and see what they are talking about today.
Usually you need an agency to help you, but it is important to give them a clear brief: You do not just want an analysis of scale and engagement.
You want to know:
- What are the narratives around civil society and related topics?
- Is the narrative you want to promote already present?
- If so, what kind of stories and messages make up that narrative? And who are the people involved in the conversation? Those are stories, messages and people you can focus on.
This toolkit is focused on communications because there is already an extremely rich body of work on narrative and audience research. We will just summarize some of the tools you can use:
- President Bukele’s discourse analysis.
- Surveys are the basic form of understanding the scale of support and agreement for basic ideas. Online surveys are an increasingly cheap and accessible way to gauge support for basic propositions.
- Focus groups are a great way of gaining a deeper understanding of how people think about your issues and how they respond to your messages and stories. Do not leave focus groups to politicians: Even if you lack resources you can convene informal focus groups among your circles of supporters and acquaintances—get together and show them your content and ask them questions.
- Sensing is a movement-centered approach to understanding your audiences that involves field research that can be carried out by grassroots campaigners. You can find out more about sensing from MobLab here and worksheets here.
If you cannot afford to hire research agencies for this work, you could try reaching out to universities, social science departments or other academic bodies who might also be interested in carrying out research as part of their ongoing work.
Targeted social media advertising allows you to reach very specific audiences with tailored versions of your messages and stories.
As described above, you can use them to test and refine your storytelling for different audiences.
If you use this approach, the costs of advertising can be very low, especially in the Global South. Our Facebook advertising costs in El Salvador were high when we posted our very first ads but quickly declined once we started refining our posts based on what worked, to the point where they cost less than 10% of what similar ads would have cost in the United States.
You have probably heard of Instagram influencers: ordinary people who are paid to promote commercial brands. There are young people who make a living by being an online figure who influences the choices of other people. Since we in civil society are also in the business of (political) influencing, this is a trend that we cannot ignore.
What this means in practice is identifying individuals who have a small but loyal following: People trust them and follow their lead. Since people are more likely to believe messages from people they trust, finding political “micro-influencers” who can share stories and lead by example can be a powerful way to spread narratives.
We need people to create the stories that feed our narratives. And when those stories happen, we need people to talk about them. The most basic step we can do to make this happen is to make sure that the people in our movements and communities are part of this work.
Often, our activists take the lead from our organizations and believe that our work is all about protesting and criticizing governments. Meanwhile, they are taking part in community work that is the reality of civil society without actually telling the story of that work.
Narrative organizing involves making sure everyone is on board with the strategy: They are on the lookout for stories that reinforce our narrative. You can achieve this with simple tools like a cheat sheet you can circulate among your members and activists to encourage them to come forward and share stories about local acts of solidarity in the community.
You can also produce a creative brief where you outline your values and vision to inspire creatives who might want to support your work in their own way.
Tools & tips
Learn more about the tools that you can use: