What Is Social Impact Storytelling?
Social impact storytelling is a valuable tool that organizations can use to frame their work through a clear narrative. It allows you to share the value and purpose of your work using carefully created stories. You can expand on further goals and show an action plan to achieve them. Your storytelling melds raw data and objective facts with individual narratives, creating a compelling story you can use to convince others to join or support your cause.
Human beings are, by nature, lovers of stories, so when organizations can articulate their impact on the world through a good story, people listen.
What Can Social Impact Storytelling Achieve?
Ultimately, social impact storytelling is about thoughtful, intentional communication. It’s highly effective in getting your message out in a way that’s easy and engaging for people to consume. What that means for any individual organization will vary, but there are a few broad objectives it can accomplish.
Highlighting Social Issues
Generally, social issues can be difficult concepts to sell to an audience. Sure, everyone cares about feeding underprivileged kids or providing education to underserved communities in the broadest sense, but it’s hard to inspire any real kind of passion when disconnected from the issue.
Social impact storytelling can help you take an issue you care about and convince others of its importance by framing it through a personal lens. By focusing on a specific person or people dealing with a social issue, you put a personal face on the issue and can highlight its specific impact on them. This kind of storytelling takes the abstract concept of your social issue and anchors it into a real, lived experience. That human connection makes the issue feel all the more real and concrete to your audience.
Influencing Public Perception
When working to combat huge societal issues, shaping public perception is crucial in achieving your goals. Stories have an innate ability to create unconscious connections between their characters and their audiences. Organizations can utilize that inherent connection to affect public perception.
By showing the world your work and the people it’s helping, you can garner empathy among your audience. If you happen to be helping a group that might suffer from some social stigma, crafting the right story can also make a considerable difference in disabusing people of any unearned negative perceptions.
Driving Societal Change
From old fairy tales to modern movies, everyone has encountered a story that left an impression on them. A good story doesn’t just entertain someone; it can reshape how they live their lives. Social impact storytelling embraces our special connection to stories and inspires people to go out into the world and take action.
These impacts can range from motivating someone to make a small change in their daily behavior to getting them out and volunteering. They can affect a wide audience of people who might otherwise not have done anything at all. It’s then that society itself begins to change.
The Intersection Between Narrative and Activism
There are many things social impact storytelling can do, but to use it, you have to grasp the fundamentals. There’s a lot to think about when determining how to frame your work within a story best, but the key elements to be aware of are:
Engaging With Your Audience’s Emotions
Emotions are often disparaged as irrational or unimportant, something that needs to be eschewed in favor of cold, hard data. They are also the living, beating heart of any good story. Let’s be clear: verified statistics and information are hugely important to any organization that wants to make real change in the world. With social impact storytelling, those data points can be paired with a moving story to sell your mission to your audience in a powerful way.
Charts are impressive, but they don’t inspire people like a story can. Your story can also provide an invaluable framework to help your audience digest your data. For example, if you have a chart demonstrating the literacy rate in an area rising over time, it becomes much more powerful when you can introduce your audience to someone who served as a data point.
Demonstrating the Authentic Human Element
Human beings can smell fraud from a mile away. No one wants to feel taken advantage of, and no one likes insincerity. Social impact storytelling is an excellent tool to help you demonstrate your authenticity, alleviating any doubts your audience might have about whether you or your organization are the real deal. It gives you the chance to show the real people impacted by your work, and it allows you to show what the work means to you. It also allows you to talk about yourself, going back through your journey of how you ended up championing the cause you care about.
Give your passion a chance to shine, and if your audience sees the steps that made you so passionate, they might also start feeling some of that passion.
Showing Your Audience a Path Forward
The most important thing in social impact storytelling is leaving your audience with a sense of hope. You need to show them that though the work may be challenging, there is a bright future at the end of the road. Good social impact storytelling can highlight people triumphing over insurmountable odds, taking charge of their lives, and progressing in a challenging world. Through their stories, you can inspire your audience and show them that your goals are within reach. Personal success stories can convince someone that not only is a cause a just fight but a winnable one.
Many organizations partner with experienced storytellers to find the most engrossing way to communicate their stories, objectives, and information. A partnership with a video production company, such as Pretzel Logic Productions, can be a valuable asset. By connecting with people’s emotions, you can greatly enhance their understanding of your cause.