My foundation supports organizations working on some issues that are too abstract or boring for a lot of people, like national security internet freedom, and campaign-finance reform. How can we identify and tell great stories about those issues?
There is nothing inherently boring about the issues you name. National security, Internet freedom, and campaign-finance reform are critical to anyone who wants to live in peace, use a computer, or have their vote count. Which is to say, nearly everyone.
What I suspect turns a lot of people off about stories on such issues is they feel unable to find the human element in your work, powerless to effect change, and/or disconnected from the issue.
There are different fixes for each of these problems.
Focus on the people behind your issue.
I talked with communications expert Andy Goodman about this question, and he suggested, “Ask yourself: Who’s involved and who has something at stake? Many nonprofit stories are boring precisely because they’re about an organization, issue, place, or thing—everything but real people!” (I highly recommend Andy’s periodicals and books.)
For example, when “This American Life” teamed up with NPR News to explore the housing crisis, they didn’t just talk about numbers. Instead, they got stories from a long chain of people that led from Wall Street to Main Street. The resulting episode, “The Giant Pool of Money,” focused on each person’s motivations, challenges, and choices—all elements of a good story, and all things that too many nonprofits neglect to include when they talk about their work.
Make your audience feel empowered.
A lot of people will look at an issue like campaign-finance reform and think, “I’m no good with numbers, so I’ll leave that issue to the experts.” Or “Nothing will ever change the huge amounts of money in politics, so I won’t bother getting involved.”
But if you frame your issue as being, say, a struggle for the soul of American democracy, that’s still a titanic challenge, but it yields relatable stories about how people create change.
Also consider telling a long-term “story” about the big changes you want to make (say, revolutionizing how elections are financed), and interim stories about narrower challenges (a specific policy change in one test state). That way, your stakeholders feel they are part of something historic and can help make real progress.
Help people identify their own connections to the issue.
Maybe your audiences don’t see how your stories relate to them. They may think, “If a few suspected terrorists get tortured in the name of national security—what does that have to do with me?” Your job is to reveal that connection to your audience or enable them to make those connections on their own.
For example, President Obama solicited people’s stories about the importance of health-care reform in their lives, and thousands responded. This story-gathering process had several benefits. It helped policy makers understand how people related to health care and helped them craft the reform bill to meet people’s needs; it yielded a collection of stories that could be used to persuade skeptics; and it built a huge email list the administration could draw on to enlist volunteers to rally even more support.
Nonprofits and funders can take a page from this playbook.
Thanks for reading, and please share your comments and examples below.
