Run a storytelling partnership

It is good to have a simple phrase that captures your message and can be repeated throughout the majority of stories. While hashtags are useful for curation, they did not help increase engagement with the content on social media.

When you are storytelling for a cause you need a common thread for all the stories. After all, your stories are tiles in a mosaic. They can be different, but they need to contribute to a common narrative. Everyone gathering and telling stories must be aware of the story being told. 

We want to tell stories of community, so it is important that you and your partners tell stories of people working together, not just isolated individuals.

If possible, involve your storytellers from the start of the process. They also need time to  integrate your new ideas and adjust their approach. To create your narrative, you need spaces to collectively think about your values and vision, without reacting to harmful narratives that impose dominant and repressive ideas. 

The best way to use the tools in this toolkit to develop your narrative strategy is in a creative, bright workshop or “lab” space where you bring together different groups of people with different perspectives but a shared passion for the work. That will allow you to step back from the immediate challenges you face and focus on your long-term change goals.

Your brief can include a set of objectives for both the storytelling goals but also the wider narrative strategy: You want to tell a certain kind of story, but you also want to make sure those stories feed your narrative. 

Your objectives should prioritize learning and long-term change over short-term metrics. It is great if social media posts perform well, but it is more important to learn why content performs well and be clear what kind of engagement with people you are looking for, so that it informs future storytelling and activism. 

While it is good to provide storytelling freedom, try to be clear on some basic but important themes or messages you want to run throughout the project. 

In some cases, storytellers will have their own contacts in community organizations they can reach out to. Indeed, it might be better if they try to find their own leads because they might think of less political stories to tell that you do not—such as sports groups. Part of the benefit of partnership is having the different perspective of, for example, journalists, in bringing your values to life. 

Where possible, maintain engagement between the activists who developed the original messages and the storytellers. For example, you can arrange an informal, internal focus group to see how the message has been brought to life. If things are missing, they can be accentuated in future content. And at the same time remember that you are not your audience, hence, the product is never going to be what the activists would imagine—and that is a good thing! Let the creators do their magic.

It is important to frame these sessions with the “mosaic” idea: There is no one perfect story. The purpose is as much for activists to see how their values and vision are brought to life by others as it is for the storytellers to get feedback about their content. Storytellers must have freedom to tell stories authentically if they are to be engaging and relatable. 

The more content you have, the more there is to share and test. You want to have different versions of every story so that you can refine and test the way you talk about civil society. For example, a story might work better from the perspective of the activist or from the person they are helping.

We experimented with different formats, but Alharaca found that video consistently led to greater engagement, which then informed their approach to story gathering, making sure the whole team was trained in videography.

Rather than waiting for one big campaign launch day, as storytellers produce content, you can constantly roll it out and test different versions of the content, providing feedback about what resonates.

Remember there will be no final and definitive story that captures the beautiful diversity of civil society: In narrative communications your goal is a constant flow of different stories that together form a narrative.

You might even have different versions of the same story for different audiences or moments in time. For example, you can tell stories of activists who empower people, but also tell the story from the perspective of the people who are empowered. You can focus on what motivates the people who work in civil society, or you can ask the beneficiaries to express how it feels when another person is ready to support them. 

Above all, you can make stories less about individuals and more about community: people coming together.

Distribution is an absolutely crucial part of communications. You need to make sure your story gets to people—do not wait for people to come to your story. 

A basic step is pitching stories to journalists. You can also use the content producers to provide B-roll (raw video footage that can be inserted in television news stories) and stock images that reporters can use in their own reporting. For example, when there is a news report about a government measure that shrinks civic space, would you rather the image shows an angry protest or someone bringing bread to their neighbor?

Another way to make sure people see your stories is paid social media advertising.

Learn more at Audience section →

Step one in making sure your stories are seen is asking your biggest supporters to share them for you.

Tell your audience why sharing these stories is important. We want people to know that: Civil society is about community, that people care about each other, that together we can be resilient in hard times. (These are examples of messages—run tests to find out what best motivates your target audiences to share your stories.)

Learn more at Audience section →

Community. Involve people in the experience: What have they done for their community, more interaction → community manager?

Posts / stories with actions that other people can do or replicate (e.g., houses, collective care, disaster prevention). Turning your content into “explainers” or manuals for action turns an individual story into a collective one, in line with the “community” narrative. 

Invite people to share their own videos and amplify them when they do.

• Rather than building a new pro-civil society community from scratch, your storytelling project can activate existing communities behind your cause. Getting people to talk about their shared experiences will form organic and lasting connections. Sometimes it is enough to talk to people about a project they already know, but through the frame of civil society values so that they see new perspectives and associate your values with something they already care about.  
• Get the protagonists to share their own story. 
• The stories in the series that performed best had the engagement of the protagonists. Making different kinds of civil society activists part of the story encourages them to become voices defending our shared civic space (where before they might only think about their own issue). 
• When you tell people’s stories, encourage them to also share the story and your messages about community, empathy and resilience. Crucially, they can mobilize their issue networks and communities in support of a broader “common cause”—civil society!

• We recommend using metrics to provide insights but not as something that pushes us to the stories most likely to get clicks. By exploring solutions-focused stories they found that their audiences were ready to consume them because they needed hope in dark times.
• Think about what success means for you. Basic metrics like engagement are important, but starting out these might be lower than the stories your audience is interested in. Do you want to reach a certain kind of audience? Do you want them to react a certain way? Do you want them to share the story or click on links where they might sign up to get more involved?