The Power of Stories

This story originally appeared on monthlydevelopment.org 

Stories inspire. Stories motivate. They even change people’s opinions and behaviors. While nonprofits have powerful stories to tell, they have not always capitalized on that ability. Hackneyed narratives and overt propagandizing once prevailed. But that is changing as organizations recognize the power of storytelling and take advantage of the myriad tools and channels available to them.

Why are stories important? Neuroscience confirms that humans tend to remember facts and details when presented in stories. Stories provide familiar structures that allow people to navigate and organize information. Essential to good storytelling is conveying authentic emotion. Stories foster connections—empathetic links—that draw the reader or viewer in, enabling him or her to walk in another’s shoes. A well-told story leads its audience on a journey from head to heart, fostering what psychologists term “narrative transport.”

Nonprofits are actively harnessing this ability and using storytelling to serve multiple needs: from communications to programming, fundraising to evaluation. Some are striving to do this seamlessly, so that storytelling becomes a part of their organizational DNA.

“Our community loves to get together and share stories,” says Kevin Quigley, president of the National Peace Corps Association. “The Peace Corps is a transformative experience, and the best way to convey that is through storytelling.” Among the many ways that the Peace Corps has integrated storytelling into its operations is to create a website and Facebook page where Peace Corps volunteers can share their stories. “We tell them, ‘Pick the campfire you want to sit around.’ … Some may want to communicate with people who served in Thailand or Honduras, while others want to reach out to their college friends,” says Quigley. “They get to choose.”

Creating meaningful connections

The successful storyteller finds ways to create meaningful connections between his or her subjects and the audience. According to storytelling expert Brian McDonald, author of The Golden Theme, this is achieved through underscoring our essential humanity and the characteristics people share irrespective of their life circumstances. McDonald points out the simple truth that we are all essentially the same. “The closer a story comes to illuminating this truth,” he writes, “the more powerful and universal it becomes, and the more people are touched by it.”

Research shows, moreover, that the story of a single individual has a much greater impact than a story of two or more. That does not mean that such a narrative will automatically lead to action such as volunteering or donating to a cause. You still have to creatively integrate facts and figures that back up the emotional call to action.

As writers who capture the stories of young people impacted through the programs of the International Youth Foundation (IYF), we strive to identify universal experiences shared by youth around the world. The life skills training that forms the bedrock of much of IYF’s programming provides fertile ground for exploring basic human drivers: “How do I feel about myself and my future? What am I good at? What causes me to lose sleep at night? What are my goals?” Whether you are growing up in a disadvantaged community in New York, New Delhi or Dar es Salaam, chances are the same thoughts have crossed your mind at one point or another. Our job is to accurately portray a young person’s life circumstances, while capturing elements of the human journey he or she shares with all of us.

In addition to using stories to demonstrate a common human experience, research confirms the sheer power of optimism as a narrative theme. “Stories of an individual’s resilience are really important because people want to support a winning cause, something that will work,” says Debra Rubino, director of strategic communications at the Open Society Institute (OSI) in Baltimore. “Stories of individuals overcoming challenges help motivate people to get on board—whether the goal is to raise money or vote in a particular way,” she explains.

Some organizations have the courage to tell stories of failure instead of success. And those, too, can add real value. “I think stories about failure—if it’s overcome or important lessons are learned—can be very powerful,” says Quigley. “We can learn more from our failures than our successes, if we have the right attitude.”

Storytelling and evaluation

A growing area of interest among NGOs is using storytelling to strengthen evaluation efforts, and, conversely, using evaluation to collect learning stories from the field. “There are limitations to quantitative impact evaluation,” says Tom Leavitt, principal of Analytic Resources, an evaluation consultancy. “It assesses the extent to which change has occurred, but gives you very little indication of how and why that change is taking place.” Focus groups, one-on-one interviews and beneficiary stories help fill important gaps—demonstrating success as well as barriers to achieving impact.

Leavitt underscores the tendency among nonprofits to focus on best practice storytelling, as opposed to highlighting what is not working, why and what to do about it. Story gathering that focuses on a range of participants, as opposed to a success-only approach, can provide the finely-grained insights that provide a fulsome picture of a program’s impact.

A focus on story collection can have the added benefit of equipping program beneficiaries with storytelling skills. Leavitt points to the growing trend of participant action research in which beneficiaries are equipped to gather information, including anecdotal evidence, which can inform evaluation efforts. This can include written interviews or videotaped testimonials. “Ideally, you’d be looking for a marriage of data and stories,” he concludes, “to glean the full picture of a program’s impact.”

Former IYF program director Jack Boyson tells the story of an evaluation of the organization’s youth employability program in the southern Philippines: “If you looked purely at the number of youth to secure jobs, the results were not what we had hoped for, due to ongoing civil strife and the inability of young people to migrate to where the jobs were located.” Through capturing anecdotal evidence, however, the evaluation team discovered that the young people’s lives—and their attitudes toward their futures—were dramatically impacted through the life skills training they received. “For the youth, the experience of building their self-esteem and connecting with their peers in a structured environment was overwhelmingly positive,” says Boyson, who underscores the need for in-person interviews and first-person testimonials to back up statistical evidence.

Training staff as storytellers

As NGOs expand their use of storytelling to get their message out and demonstrate impact, they tend to rely on those who already have a talent for the task or have the confidence to try. That said, NGOs are starting to be more pro-active by training staff to be better storytellers. CARE International, for example, held a two-day training workshop for 25 program staff in Rwanda two years ago—the first ever for the organization. The classes emphasized hands-on, interactive exercises, role playing and field work, with a focus on developing specific skills such as conducting effective interviews, learning to listen as part of the writing process, using photographs to strengthen and add value to the story, and knowing the difference between quantitative and qualitative writing.

"Program staff in the field sit on a gold mine of powerful stories, but they may not know how to capture them," says Bea Spadacini, a former communications officer at CARE who ran the training sessions in Rwanda. "My message was not to anticipate the story but to let it unfold and come their way," she explains. "I wanted to help them to break through their 'logic frameworks' and always be open and receptive to finding the story that has an emotional pull." Spadacini credits CARE for making a real commitment to this type of storytelling training, which remains unusual among NGOs. She echoes those who believe that stories enrich the monitoring and evaluation process—and can add real insight into how a particular program affects beneficiaries and their communities.

Such staff training exercises have netted positive returns. CARE’s Rwanda office won first prize in the CARE human interest storytelling competition that same year.

Strategic storytelling

With nonprofits becoming increasingly sophisticated in their storytelling—and with distribution channels expanding rapidly—NGOs need to be more strategic than ever in how they gather and disseminate stories. Quality is key. “People are tired of overused imagery and words and unrelated photos that don’t build on the story,” says OSI’s Rubino. “Plus, the bar for stories has been raised so high that it’s getting tougher and tougher to break away from the pack.”

Equipping those you serve with the ability to tell their own stories—through blogs or video diaries—is one way of putting forth fresh, authentic, heartfelt voices. Youth, in particular, often welcome the chance to share their perspectives and experiences.

Quality goes hand in hand with planning ahead. Field staff are often best equipped to identify those stories worth telling, thereby saving time. Preparation means figuring out, ahead of time, how the time and resources invested in obtaining a story can be leveraged for multiple purposes. Written stories alone may represent a missed opportunity. Photo essays, videos, podcasts and serial stories can all be gleaned from the same subject(s) and promoted via a range of social media channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and Scribd.

Whereas in the past NGOs would distribute stories and passively await a response—whether it be from the media or other target audiences—social media offers a dynamic, interactive environment. While there are risks involved in this open marketplace, the potential benefits, in terms of audience engagement and getting your message out, far outweigh the negatives. Those nonprofits that are successful at distributing their stories are also experts at building vibrant online communities.

Stories that change the world

Can stories contribute to long-term social change? Definitely, although that difference is likely to evolve over time as the result of multiple factors which eventually foster a tipping point that leads to changed attitudes and beliefs. Tom Atlee, founder and co-director of the Co-Intelligence Institute, has written extensively on the power of ‘story fields,’ or constellations of stories that reinforce each other. “Story fields exert tremendous influence on us,” writes Atlee, “driving us and limiting—or enlarging—our sense of reality and possibility … Social transformation is usually preceded or accompanied by a change in the story field governing that system.” As nonprofits pursue their missions and leverage the power of story, it is important to be aware of the story fields already out there that could help or hinder their efforts—and then work collectively to foster a unified and compelling vision for the future.

Storytelling tips for NGOs

• Show, don’t tell. Paint a picture in the mind of your reader. Use sensory details to communicate a sense of place, a mood or feeling. Rather than presenting your readers with a fact (25 percent of youth in X country are unemployed), tell a story about a youth struggling to get a job and how he/she fits within a larger context.
• Seek out the authentic, the original. Spend the time needed with your subjects to move beyond predictable, clichéd storylines. What makes their story special, compelling, unusual? Even better, consider presenting their stories in the first person. 
• Simplify your prose. Vary your sentence structure. Convey key points with fewer words. 
• Beware of development jargon. Words and phrases like capacity-building, multi-sector partnerships and sustainability don’t belong in stories that seek to foster heartfelt connections. 
• Leverage multiple media. Consider the wealth of distribution channels you have at your disposal ahead of time and plan accordingly. Maximize your investment in storytelling by using a variety of communications tools (print, video, audio, high quality photography). Think about how you can create buzz—and spark dialogue—via social media. 
• Put ethics first. Be sure to communicate to your subjects how their stories will be used. While release forms offer legal protection, it is important to build an authentic relationship with subjects who often feel beholden to donors and charitable organizations.